移动体验恶言堂

虽然工作仍无着落，天天忙着简历，求职，但还是不想放下习惯，今天在经济学人看到一篇好文，挑出来翻译。

Blogging
Going Pro

博客：向专业化进军

More people are quitting their day jobs to blog for a living

为了生活，越来越多的人辞掉了工作，投身于博客的世界

ON HER blog, called Dooce, Heather Armstrong chronicles her life as a disenchanted Mormon in Salt Lake City, her former career as a high-flying web designer in Los Angeles, her pregnancy and postpartum depression, and so on. A year ago, her blog started generating enough advertising revenue to become the main source of income for her family. She is not alone. There are now just enough people like Ms Armstrong to signify a new trend: blogging as a small business.

希瑟.阿姆斯壮在她的博客——Dooce之上，将自己生活记录在案：一个盐湖城的幻想家，曾经激情四射的网页设计师，怀孕与产后却深陷低沉。一年前，Dooce创造的广告收入，已经变成其收入的主要来源。而且希瑟并不孤单，如她一样的人之多，已意味着一种新的潮流：博客成为一种小型的商业模式。

Until recently, there were two main kinds of blogs. Most of the 57m blogs in existence are personal diaries that happen to be online. These blogs have tiny audiences and make no effort to sell advertising. Services such as Google’s AdSense, which places text advertisements on blogs and generates a few cents per mouse click, might bring in some spare change. But according to Pew, an American research organisation, only 7% of bloggers say their main motivation is to make money.

直至今日，博客的类型仍然主要分为两种。57M个博客中，大部分仍是以个人日记的形式出现在网络之上。这些博客受众极少，无法吸引广告。像Google Adsense这样，将文字广告投放至博客，通过点击量赚取广告费的服务，或许会带来一些变化。但是，美国调查研究中心的Pew表示，仅有7%的博客写作动机为赚钱。

The second main kind of blogs are, in effect, niche magazines that choose to publish in a blog format. These blogs are explicitly run as businesses, with paid staff doing the writing and sales departments selling advertising. The best example is Gawker Media, a stable of blogs that includes Gawker, a New York gossip site, and Gizmodo, a blog devoted to gadgets. Collectively its 14 blogs get 60m page views a month. Such blogs are “the most profitable media business today,” says Jason Calacanis, who runs Weblogs Inc, another stable of popular blogs that he sold to AOL, the web arm of Time Warner, a year ago. His sites, including Engadget, another gadget blog, are “an eight-figure-a-year business” with negligible distribution costs compared with the huge printing and shipping bills of traditional magazines.

Now, however, a third category is emerging: the mom-and-pop blog. “In the old days, we used to be called newsletter publishers,” says Om Malik, a technology writer who quit his job at Business 2.0 magazine in June to work full-time on his blog, GigaOm. He has hired two other writers, and his blog now attracts about 50,000 readers a day, generating “tens of thousands” in monthly revenues. Costs, including salaries, are around $20,000 a month.

无论如何，第三浪潮开始凸现：the mom-and-pop blog 。“从前，我们被称做报纸出版商”，7月份从《商业2.0》辞职转投全职博客——Gigaom 的技术作家Om Malik说道。他聘请了另两个作者，现在他的博客每天可吸引5万个读者，每月可创造“数十万”的收入。成本呢？包括工资在内，每月只有2万而已。

One big reason why his blog works as a small business, says Mr Malik, is that an ecosystem of support is appearing. Like Ms Armstrong, he farms out advertising sales and administration to a firm called FM, launched last year by John Battelle, who once ran magazines such as Wired and the Industry Standard. In his old business of magazines, says Mr Battelle, the cost of acquiring an audience was “stupendous”—at Wired it was about $100 per subscriber. The cost of building a readership for a blog, by contrast, is nil. Once you have a lot of readers, however, the bandwidth costs become significant, and most medium-sized blogs cannot afford to hire the sales people needed to generate sufficient revenue. So FM’s 15 sales people negotiate with advertisers on behalf of blogs they represent, keeping 40% of the resulting revenues.

Mr Malik说，支持的环境逐渐显现，这是博客得以以小型商业模式运作的原因之一。像希瑟一样，他将广告销售交由John在去年成立、曾经代理《无线》《工业标准》两本杂志的FM公司代理。在旧有的杂志商业模式中，Battelle说，吸引读者的成本“惊人”——在《无线》中，吸引一位读者需100美元。相比之下，在博客中建立读者群，成本是0！可是，一旦你拥有了众多的读者，带宽成本必然增加，而大多数中小规模的博客无法承受雇佣销售人员去创造更多的收入。因此，FM的15位销售人员便代表博客，与广告商谈判，并获取百分之40的广告提成。

For people like Ms Armstrong, who has about 1m visitors to her site a month, this makes blogging worthwhile. But it is not for everybody, she notes. She works about seven hours a day on her site, and continues to work while on holiday. Mr Malik concurs. “It’s not easy,” he says. Building his audience has “taken me five years, and a lot of sleepless nights.”

对于希瑟这些每月拥有1千万访问量的人来说，博客变得有意义。但并非所有人如此，她说道。希瑟每天在她的网页上工作近七个小时，连假期也不例外。Mr Malik同样如此，“这并不容易。”他说，建立读者群花掉了他“五年时间，还有无数个不夜眠”。