Wednesday
Blogging for Bucks
By Leander Kahney
Journalist Rafat Ali is an unusual beast: a laid-off dot-com reporter who's making money online writing about, well, making money online.
Ali, a former reporter for Inside.com and an editor at the Silicon Alley Reporter, is making a comfortable living as an independent journalist-cum-blogger.
Working out of his East London flat, Ali publishes PaidContent, a one-man trade newsletter about the business of online media.
After six months of publication, Ali has earned as much as he would make in a year as an editor at the Silicon Alley Reporter. And he has just won a prestigious European Online Journalism Award for News Weblog of the Year.
Published daily, Ali's site mixes weblog entries with Ali's original reporting. The site boasts a healthy readership and a full roster of advertisers. Though Ali puts in odd hours (he works on New York time), he doesn't seem too stressed about paying the rent. Wired News asked him by e-mail how he does it.
Wired News: So how much money do you make?
Rafat Ali: I have only been in this full time for about five or six months, so it's early days, but I am slated to get about $60,000-$80,000 in advertising/sponsorship alone this year. I earn enough now in U.S. terms to live comfortably. Of course, convert the money I am getting into U.K. pounds, and then take out the ridiculous amount of U.K. tax -- but it is still a lot more than I would have earned in New York City or London in a full-time mid-level journalism job.
WN: What are the sources of your income? Is PaidContent your only source of revenue, or do you have a trust fund?
Ali: Advertising and sponsorships. My newsletter commands premium rates. It goes out now to about 2,500 subscribers daily and (has) about 10,000 pageviews on the site daily. Plus, I estimate about 500 to 700 people get my (site summary) feed. I do not freelance. This is my sole work. And I wish I had a trust fund!
WN: What's your lifestyle like? Where do you live? What car do you drive? What do you do in your spare time?
Ali: I live in a small flat in East London in an area called Leytonstone. I don't drive. I have never owned a car. I don't even have a license. I don't have a lot of free time. I read a lot.
WN: Describe your typical working day.
Ali: I work U.S. hours. I wake up around 11 a.m. or noon every day. I ferret out the first set of links and then send out the newsletter by about 2 p.m. London time, which is 9 a.m. EST. Then I ... catch up on news outside my work (I read the Guardian and The New York Times online). Then I catch up on e-mail, breaking news if any, and update the site until about 5 p.m. I catch up with friends in London and U.S. on the phone. Then I do the last set of updates on the site. I might call up sources in U.S. on the West Coast. I do that until about 1 or 2 a.m.
However, I do travel a lot, mainly to conferences. In the last three or four months I've been to Germany, Holland, New York City three times, Boston, Spain. I live-blog these conferences as much as possible.
WN: How did PaidContent get started?
Ali: I started PaidContent.org in June 2002, as a way to raise my profile as a journalist.... I wanted to get out of my Silicon Alley Reporter job, and getting into this area seemed logical.
I kept doing it on the side, and started doing some original stories, which got linked from other places like Jim Romenesko and I Want Media. Then word-of-blog started. It grew bigger and bigger and I started getting e-mails from vendors asking if I took advertising. I refused then (this was fall 2002) since I didn't want to get into trouble with the Alley.
WN: How and why did you choose the focus of paid content?
Ali: Niche, niche and niche, that's the name of the game. You can't just start a site/blog just because you love it, and there are 1,000 other sites like that out there. Unless you know that you will be breaking stories that no one else will.
I have been lucky that I caught a sort of curve, a trend toward paid content. The great thing about doing everything so lean is that you are very flexible and fast, so you can mold your site to whatever trends are emerging.
Another important factor is being international. I try to cover both sides of the Atlantic, most European countries and Asia to some extent. The problem (with Asia) is the language.
But being international has meant that I have been able to attract advertising clients from U.S. as well as Europe. Another thing is that technology/software companies are always looking to expand in different countries: U.S. comp
By Leander Kahney
Journalist Rafat Ali is an unusual beast: a laid-off dot-com reporter who's making money online writing about, well, making money online.
Ali, a former reporter for Inside.com and an editor at the Silicon Alley Reporter, is making a comfortable living as an independent journalist-cum-blogger.
Working out of his East London flat, Ali publishes PaidContent, a one-man trade newsletter about the business of online media.
After six months of publication, Ali has earned as much as he would make in a year as an editor at the Silicon Alley Reporter. And he has just won a prestigious European Online Journalism Award for News Weblog of the Year.
Published daily, Ali's site mixes weblog entries with Ali's original reporting. The site boasts a healthy readership and a full roster of advertisers. Though Ali puts in odd hours (he works on New York time), he doesn't seem too stressed about paying the rent. Wired News asked him by e-mail how he does it.
Wired News: So how much money do you make?
Rafat Ali: I have only been in this full time for about five or six months, so it's early days, but I am slated to get about $60,000-$80,000 in advertising/sponsorship alone this year. I earn enough now in U.S. terms to live comfortably. Of course, convert the money I am getting into U.K. pounds, and then take out the ridiculous amount of U.K. tax -- but it is still a lot more than I would have earned in New York City or London in a full-time mid-level journalism job.
WN: What are the sources of your income? Is PaidContent your only source of revenue, or do you have a trust fund?
Ali: Advertising and sponsorships. My newsletter commands premium rates. It goes out now to about 2,500 subscribers daily and (has) about 10,000 pageviews on the site daily. Plus, I estimate about 500 to 700 people get my (site summary) feed. I do not freelance. This is my sole work. And I wish I had a trust fund!
WN: What's your lifestyle like? Where do you live? What car do you drive? What do you do in your spare time?
Ali: I live in a small flat in East London in an area called Leytonstone. I don't drive. I have never owned a car. I don't even have a license. I don't have a lot of free time. I read a lot.
WN: Describe your typical working day.
Ali: I work U.S. hours. I wake up around 11 a.m. or noon every day. I ferret out the first set of links and then send out the newsletter by about 2 p.m. London time, which is 9 a.m. EST. Then I ... catch up on news outside my work (I read the Guardian and The New York Times online). Then I catch up on e-mail, breaking news if any, and update the site until about 5 p.m. I catch up with friends in London and U.S. on the phone. Then I do the last set of updates on the site. I might call up sources in U.S. on the West Coast. I do that until about 1 or 2 a.m.
However, I do travel a lot, mainly to conferences. In the last three or four months I've been to Germany, Holland, New York City three times, Boston, Spain. I live-blog these conferences as much as possible.
WN: How did PaidContent get started?
Ali: I started PaidContent.org in June 2002, as a way to raise my profile as a journalist.... I wanted to get out of my Silicon Alley Reporter job, and getting into this area seemed logical.
I kept doing it on the side, and started doing some original stories, which got linked from other places like Jim Romenesko and I Want Media. Then word-of-blog started. It grew bigger and bigger and I started getting e-mails from vendors asking if I took advertising. I refused then (this was fall 2002) since I didn't want to get into trouble with the Alley.
WN: How and why did you choose the focus of paid content?
Ali: Niche, niche and niche, that's the name of the game. You can't just start a site/blog just because you love it, and there are 1,000 other sites like that out there. Unless you know that you will be breaking stories that no one else will.
I have been lucky that I caught a sort of curve, a trend toward paid content. The great thing about doing everything so lean is that you are very flexible and fast, so you can mold your site to whatever trends are emerging.
Another important factor is being international. I try to cover both sides of the Atlantic, most European countries and Asia to some extent. The problem (with Asia) is the language.
But being international has meant that I have been able to attract advertising clients from U.S. as well as Europe. Another thing is that technology/software companies are always looking to expand in different countries: U.S. comp
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