Lorelle VanFossen has started a problogging series on the Blog Herald and one of her recent posts is about whether blogger earnings are enough relative to national standards.

To make the average annual US income of $60,000, you need to make $34 an hour. If you are paid $5 a blog post, you would have to write 12,000 blog posts. At $25 a blog post, you would have to publish 2,400. For $50 per post, that’s 1200 posts. At $100 per blog post, you would have to generate 600 posts.

The overall sense I’m getting here is that blogging for money isn’t quite sustainable, considering that most bloggers (that I know of) are getting way below the ideal rate of $300+ per post–and that is for top-quality, well-researched output.

There are 52 weeks in a year. Most paid bloggers need to produce a minimum of 3 posts a week. That’s 156 posts a year. Divide the annual average income of $60,000 by 156 posts, that’s $385 per post. Anyone getting paid that much to blog? I doubt it. Notch this up to 5 posts a week and you’d need 260 blog posts at $230 per post. That’s better but most bloggers are paid $$25 or less per post.

At $25 a post, you’d need to write 2,400 blog posts to earn $60,000 a year. How long would that take you? Do you have 2,400 original blog posts within you?

Another factor not taken into consideration here, I would say, is those working in the blogging industry who are not in the US. So that means your cost of living (or the income you need in order to be happy, or at least to survive) may differ. It might be higher in some regions, say Western Europe, Tokyo or Singapore. But it would definitely be lower in other places where cost of living is low. So for instance some would be well off with a fraction of the $60,000 annual income that is cited as the target income.

Still, Lorelle comes up with some figures on how long it takes to research and write good-quality posts. She also touches on the per-post or per-hour argument.

So the question here is not about how much you are earning from blogging, which has probably been discussed in many many posts around the blogosphere. It’s how much you should be earning from blogging. Suffice to say that for me $60,000 per year would go a long, long way.

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