Just as well I'm not in it for the money...

Alex Iskold of Read/WriteWeb makes a great case for why “there’s no money in the long tail of the blogosphere.” Or, indeed, in the long tail of anything. The crux of his argument: “You can make money on the long tail but not in the long tail. ” It’s an important distinction. Too many people blithely cite the Long Tail as the reason their low-volume, low-margin business will be successful.

Iskold demonstrates his point with the example of Google, which of course profits handsomely from AdSense, purely because of the huge volume:

“AdSense works for Google because the odds are in its favor – it is aggregating small amounts of traffic across the entire web. The math works for them because it is based on the massive scale of the web. It similarly works reasonably well for the sites with large amounts of traffic, but it fails for smaller publishers who have low visitor counts.”

So, all you aspiring pro-bloggers out there, don’t give up the day job!

Technorati Tags: Long Tail, blogging

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