It’s starting to look as if bloggers can make a living from their sites, thanks to an advertising boom. Companies who want to reach specific consumers — current-events mavens, conservative PhDs, cell phone fanatics — are hooking up with blogs that can deliver those eyeballs.

Some politically oriented blogs are also riding an election-year advertising wave, but industry experts expect the trend to last well beyond November.



“One of the big overriding themes over the last few quarters has been the shift from traditional media to the online space,” says Carlo Alvarez, director of media planning of the New York firm Special Ops Media, which creates non-traditional and Web-based marketing campaigns for film studios, record labels and consumer product clients.



A year ago, however, many bloggers, especially the more politically oriented variety, were unsure that they’d ever do any better financially than collecting occasional cash “tips” from readers to spend on maintaining their sites — costs that can range into hundreds of dollars a month for the bigger blogs.



For folks such as Reynolds, a law professor who blogs for fun, making money didn’t matter much, but to other bloggers such as TalkingPointsMemo.com’s Joshua Marshall, finding a way to make blogging pay the rent was a more pressing concern.



Marshall told the Tribune last November that he had “thought about all sorts of ideas for funding the site,” but he doesn’t need to rack his brain any longer. He’s got more than a dozen ads on his site now, and by the looks of things he’s making much more than Internet server costs and burger money.



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