There is a myth being perpetrated in the tech blogosphere that it isn’t about the money; that the real bloggers do it for the love it. Well they might be doing it for the love of it but the money they are making isn’t hurting matters at all; after all when was the last time you saw a blogger needing to hire a CEO. However every time money and A-List is brought up in a post somewhere the disclaimers start flying.

So I decided to do some checking and I popped up the Technorati Top 100 Blogs listing and did some checking. Here is the resulting list of tech related blogs as of March 18 2007 (3:45AM) plus their current rankings:

1 Engadget                                           Ads: Yes
2 Boing Boing                                      Ads: Yes
3 TechCrunch                                      Ads: Yes
4 Gizmodo                                           Ads: Yes
7. Lifehacker                                       Ads: Yes
10 Ars Technica                                 Ads: Yes
18 Official Google Blog                     Ads: No
21 Seth’s Blog                                     Ads: Yes (His books)
24 Kotaku, the Gamer’s Guide        Ads: Yes
25 Gigazine.net                                  Ads: No (foreign)
33 Topix.net Blog                               Ads: No
34 Problogger                                    Ads: Yes
35 Joystiq                                            Ads: Yes
36 GigaOM                                          Ads: Yes
40 How to change the work              Ads: Yes
41 Read/WriteWeb                            Ads: Yes
43 iLemoned                                      Ads: No
45 Shoemoney                                   Ads: Yes
47 A List Apart                                    Ads: Yes
48 Joel on Software                           Ads: No
50 ze’s page                                        Ads: No
57 Google Blogoscoped                   Ads: Yes
60 Metafilter                                         Ads: No
61 Creating Passionate Users        Ads: No
64 Micro Persuasion                         Ads: No
68 Scobleizer                                    Ads: No
69 The Unofficial Apple Blog          Ads: Yes
74 Techdirt                                          Ads: Yes
75 Mashable!                                      Ads: Yes
76 Apple Hot News                            Ads: No
81 Valleywag                                       Ads: Yes
82 O’Reilly Radar                              Ads: No
83 Matt Cutts                                       Ads: No
88 TechEBlog                                    Ads: Yes

Now granted this is only the tech related blogs of the Technorati Top 100 which is derived from the popularly named A-List of bloggers which can; by Technorati’s own estimate, be in the 4,000 blog range world wide.

Out of the 34 tech related blogs of the Top 100 I found that 21 of them are monetized in one fashion or another so I think it would be safe to assume that the remaining 3,900 blogs of the A-List are proportionately monetized as well. I think it would also be safe to assume that while they may not be in the TechCrunch league of needing a CEO they are earning a little more than beer money.

Don’t get me wrong I don’t begrudge them a single earned dime - blogging is hard work regardless what people may think and as such they should get paid for it. The problem I have is when because of their stature and link power they appear to close ranks and feed among themselves.

Some of the A-List bloggers will say that just keep posting good content and you’ll make it. That’s is just a bunch of pure bullshit - plain and simple. The success of any professional blogger is gauged by his work but also by his or her’s link record. Simply put the more links you have in and out the more popular you are - the more widely read you are and for those that want to earn a living blogging professionally that means better advertising dollars coming in.

But when you have the upper echelon effectively doling out admittance to the bank vault then it doesn’t matter how good you write. When these self same prefects of linkage decide that they don’t want to honor your links then you find yourself stalled.

It is human nature for us to see a return for effort and it is no different with blogging; unless of course you are a Web 2.0 millionaire and have the luxury of passing on your wisdom for free. The rest of us mortals appreciate the rewards for our work. I just find the high on a horse self-righteous blogging purity attitude of some of the A-List a tad hypocritical and like many bloggers; and a growing number of readers, find the closed circle keep everyone else out mentality wrong.

I don’t really expect this to change anytime soon but in the meantime I’ll follow webomatica’s excellent list of blogger tips and work my way to the B-List. I might not like the hypocrisy but I love what I am doing and will keep on writing and I hope my readers will keep on appreciating my opinion; right or wrong :).

Conversation Tags: blogs, blogging, A-List, Technorati, advertising, hypocrisy