About 5 years ago I was at the car wash waiting on my car to get washed and a guy that was also waiting on his car casually started a conversation with me. It started off as just small talk, 2 guys waiting on their cars passing time. Eventually I noticed that this conversation was more than just casual, started to feel like an interview. Just when I was about to move away from the “random guy” because of the way the conversation headed, his purpose was made visible to me.

He was trying to recruit me.

He started telling me about how he was “Upper Management” for a new company in the area and he was looking for people to bring in to help get things started. He wanted me to come to an “interview” and meet the other people involved with the Company. He never told me any details about the company and the company name didn’t sound familiar but I suspected that company was some type of pyramid Style "get rich quick" Company (more on that in a minute). I went to the interview, and found out that the company was exactly what I was thinking, and it was just a waste of my time showing up.

Many bloggers may be offended, but I see a lot of similarities in blogging (for money) and those pyramid scheme companies. Not so much in the way it operates, but in the overall success rate and popularity of the blogging.

When it comes to those “get rich quick” schemes and companies, there are a few traits that are pretty similar to bloggers, and blogging. The first and most significant similarity is the ease of getting started. Those companies usually involve something that anyone can do. Any training you would need could be given on the job. And you would be in control of how you work. Blogging is the same way, anyone can get started, many times for free. There is plenty of information out there that you can almost train yourself as you work.

Now when I say blogging, I mean blogging as a means to make money. Yea there are plenty of people that blog “for fun”. But I’m talking about the people that got into blogging because they heard about “so and so” making $5000 a month blogging and figure they can do it too. Blogging as a business.

Every time you hear about those schemes to make money, it makes sense. You can see how that idea can make you money and there are some people that are rich because of those schemes. But by the time you hear about it, it’s usually too late to make you any money. The rest of this is all my own theory (not to say that it isn’t anything that hasn’t already been said by someone). Blogging has its own pyramid, take a look at the picture below and I’ll explain what I’m talking about.

The-Bloggers-Pyramid

The height of the pyramid and each individual section represents the number of people involved, the width of the pyramid represents the amount of money made (wider means more money).

  • The people on section A are the founders, usually the people that started things, they have made the most money, and they have the least amount of people. The thing about those people, they don’t stay around long. After they make their money, they usually move on to the next thing.
  • Section B is where most of the A-Listers are. That group is a little larger and they still make a decent amount of money. Towards the end of that section is when many started hearing about blogging as a money making tool.
  • That brings us to section C, fewer people, money is still being made but you really have to work at standing out.
  • The next section, Section D, is where I think we are now. That’s when it becomes mainstream. Only few people are making any real money from that section and bloggers are a dime a dozen.

The problem now is that blogging has become so common that it’s really time to expand onto something else, which is what brought on all the thoughts I’ve been having.
What’s next? I don’t think blogging is going anywhere, but there has to be something new soon as its starting to feel “old hat”.

Lets talk about the Section D for a minute. There are reasons why I think right now blogging in general is in Section D. The other day I was browsing a few blogs. One blog post in particular I thought was very interesting and I decided to leave a comment. Before I left the comment I read over the other comments that were already left and I noticed something. Out of the 34 comments, 30 were from other bloggers. Of coarse I wouldnt know how many people has read that post, but from going by the comments, it would appear that most of the readers of that blog post were bloggers themselves.

Being that it seems like everyone has caught on to blogging. I would guess that the people that are becoming really succesfull, to the point where blogging can or will be thier main source of income are hard to come by now adays.  Of corse, the bloggers that started in section B and C are still doing what they were doing all along. Mind you, I say blogging right now is in Section D, but the effects of section D only applys to bloggers that started blogging in Section D. If you were lucky enough to jump in before Section D started, and was successful before Section D started, that success shouldbe followed you into Section D. The Section D bloggers will have to be a bit more creative in finding niche topics if they want to make any money.

Bloggers make money by advertising, in one form or another. Now that we are in Section D, and looking at how online advertisment spending is starting to flatline. This pose another problem. Advert money is either going to start being spread too thin, or adverts are going to be a bit more picky. Since there are so many bloggers out there, blogs are starting to duplicate themselves. Meaning instead of 2 or 3 sneaker blogs with a lit of readers, there could be 15 sneaker blogs with a lot of readers. Many with the same content, same news, same info. Probably with the same visitors. Advertisers will probably start to just pick the top 2 to advertise with. The rest stuck with just Adsense.

I really think the next area to be explored is online video production. Internet shows. If I used the same pyramid from above, Id say that we are still in Section A, just about to pass over to Section B. There is another problem there though that I will talk about later on this week.