GalleyCat accidentally ended up embroiled in an Internet battle over a Wall Street Journal article about the lucrative (or not so lucrative) profession of blogging.
Here’s the passage from the WSJ essay with a GalleyCat link at the end of the first sentence: “The best studies we can find say we are a nation of over 20 million bloggers, with 1.7 million profiting from the work, and 452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income. That’s almost 2 million Americans getting paid by the word, the post, or the click — whether on their site or someone else’s.”
Those statistics generated nearly 100 blog posts as of this writing, along with an endless stream of Twitter detractors. While honored by the WSJ nod, GalleyCat had two points to add. First of all, we have too many friends struggling to make ends meet in this shifting writing market–452,000 Americans blogging for a living sounds too high. Secondly, the GalleyCat post cited by the WSJ article had a bleaker point: “More people are writing and publishing than at any other point in human history, but only two percent of them can make a living.”