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
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
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