For two years I was obsessed with trying to turn a blog into a business. I posted 10 or 20 items a day to my site, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, rarely taking a break. I blogged from cabs, using my BlackBerry. I blogged in the middle of the night, having awakened with an idea. I rationalized this insane behavior by telling myself that at the end of this rainbow I would find a huge pot of gold. But reality kept interfering with this fantasy. My first epiphany occurred in August 2007, when The New York Times ran a story revealing my identity, which until then I'd kept secret. On that day more than 500,000 people hit my site—by far the biggest day I'd ever had—and through Google's AdSense program I earned about a hundred bucks. Over the course of that entire month, in which my site was visited by 1.5 million people, I earned a whopping total of $1,039.81. Soon after this I struck an advertising deal that paid better wages. But I never made enough to quit my day job. Eventually I shut down—not for financial reasons, but because Steve Jobs appeared to be in poor health. I walked away feeling burned out and weighing 20 pounds more than when I started. I also came away with a sneaking suspicion that while blogs can do many wonderful things, generating huge amounts of money isn't one of them.

Now others seem to be riding the same downward curve, with euphoria giving way to exhaustion. Michael Arrington, whose TechCrunch blog empire attracts 6 million readers each month, has gone on a monthlong hiatus after three years of nonstop blogging. His break was prompted, he says, by burnout and by the craziness of the blogosphere (he says he's been stalked, threatened and spat on) and not by the fact that he's been trying to sell his company for a year and hasn't been able to find a buyer who'll pay his price, which is rumored to be $100 million. Gawker Media, a leading network of blogs, recently laid off all but one of its writers for Valleywag, its tech blog, which has struggled for three years. In January Pajamas Media, a collective of right-wing political bloggers, shut down its ad network, which CEO Roger Simon says "was a money loser for three years."

In late 2005 a columnist who writes for the ABC News Web site predicted that by 2010 the blogosphere would create "a whole new group of major corporations and media stars" and that "billions of dollars will be made by those prescient enough to either get onboard or invest in these companies." (He was responding to an article I'd done that criticized some elements of the blogosphere.) This guy was right on the first part, sort of. But as for those billions? Last year the total spent on blog advertising in the United States was a mere $411 million, according to researcher eMarketer. That represents only a sliver of the $23.7 billion spent on U.S. Internet ads last year, which is itself only a fraction of the $276.8 billion spent on all forms of advertising in the U.S. By 2012 blog ad spending will reach $746 million, while overall online ad spending will hit $32 billion, eMarketer says. More money was spent on e-mail advertising last year than was spent on blog advertising—yet you don't see anyone touting e-mail as the next big billion-dollar media business. Technorati, a blog researcher, estimates that bloggers who run ads earn an average of $5,060 per year. Don't call the Ferrari dealer just yet.

Advertisers shy away from blogs because they're too unpredictable and because few blogs attract anything approaching a mass audience—and even those that do face so much competition that ad rates remain pitifully low. "A lot of expectations are coming down in terms of monetizing social media," says Paul Verna, an analyst with eMarketer. " People have not figured out a clear way to monetize some of these vehicles." The bad economy compounds the problem, Verna says, but the real issue is "the lack of a clear business model that can generate substantial revenues."

To be sure, some blogs are little goldmines. Gizmodo, a gadget blog run by Gawker Media, had record traffic last month, with 98 million page views, and is "fantastically profitable," Gawker CEO Nick Denton says. Dooce, a personal-diary blog run by a husband-and-wife team, does between $500,000 to $1 million a year, according to Federated Media, which sells ads for the site. Arrington says TechCrunch did $3 million in 2007 and even more in 2008. He says he could sell the company today, albeit for a lower price than it would have fetched a year ago.

Those success stories keep money pouring into the space. The Huffington Post raised $25 million just a few months ago. The Daily Beast, led by editor Tina Brown, raised money from Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp. for its launch last October. (Disclosure: Diller is a director of The Washington Post Company, which owns NEWSWEEK.) Then again, The Huffington Post and The Daily Beast aren't really blogs —they're media companies that happen to feature, among other things, the work of some bloggers. Some A-list bloggers have found that the best way to "monetize" their work is by returning to the much-maligned "mainstream media"—like political writer Andrew Sullivan, whose blog, The Daily Dish, now runs on The Atlantic Monthly Web site. Presumably Sullivan makes a decent living. But as for that vision of the guy in his pajamas making millions with a blog? Or that one about investors raking in billions by betting on that guy in the pajamas? Take it from someone who dreamed the dream: I wish it were true, but right now it's looking like yet another high-tech fairy tale.

在過去整整兩年的時間內,我一直受到一個念頭的驅使,要將自己的博客當成一門生意。在名為“史蒂夫・喬布斯”的個人日記中,我每天要放上10到20種物品,鮮有停頓。利用自己的藍莓手機,我可以在駕駛室寫博客。每當夢中被一個新奇的點子所驚醒,我就會在半夜起來爬格子。通過不斷的自我激勵,告訴自己會在彩虹的盡頭,發現一座巨大的金礦,我替自己這種瘋狂的行為似乎找到了一個合理的解釋。而夢境總是被現實無情地打破。我的首個幸運日出現在2007年8月,紐約時報的一篇報道透露了我的的身份,而在此之前,我一直刻意加以隱瞞。當天就有超過50萬人涌進了我的個人網站,是迄今為止人數最多的一次,受益于谷歌的AdSense計劃,我掙到了大約100美元。在那整整一個月時間里,我個人網站的訪客數達到了150萬人,于是我狠狠地賺了一筆,總數居然有1,039.81美元。之后不久,我談成了一筆廣告,讓自己能掙得更多。但我從沒掙到足夠的錢,來辭掉白天的差事。最終,我還是關閉了該博客,并非出于經濟上的原因,而是由于史蒂夫・喬布斯的個人健康狀況出現了問題。我身心疲憊地離去,與當初相比,體重足足重了20磅。對此我也有一點深藏于心的小小疑問:博客可以用來做許多有益的事,但想要賺大錢顯然不在其列。

現在,其他人似乎正重蹈覆轍,在干賠本賺吆喝的傻事。邁克爾・阿靈頓,他所開創的Tech Cruch 博客帝國每月能吸引多達六百萬讀者,在經過三年從不間斷寫博客之后,出現了長達一個月的間歇。據他說,在此期間他因歇筆而飽受困擾,個中緣由既包括自己身心疲憊,也包括來自于博客世界的狂熱(據他稱,自己曾受到他人的跟蹤、威脅與惡言相向),只有一件事除外:他想將自己的公司賣掉,而在長達一年時間里,都未能找到一位買家愿意出到他的要價,謠傳為一百萬美元。Gawker Media,博客中一家名列前矛的網絡,近來,除了為其科技博客Valleywag網站保留一名作家之外,其余人均遭到了遣散的命運,而該博客已苦苦支撐了三年。一月,Pajamas Media這家由右翼寫手組成的博客群,關閉了其廣告網絡,而正如其 CEO 羅格・西蒙所言,“虧了整整三年”。

2005年下半年,據美國廣播公司新聞網站的一位撰稿人預測, 2010年前,博客將創造出“眾多全新的優質公司與媒體明星”,而且,“數十億美元將被這些先行者創造出來,并足以使它們成功上市或為它們注入所需的資金”。(當時,他是在回答我寫的一篇文章,并對博客中的某些要素進行評論時說這番話的。)他的話前半部分基本言之有理,但那數十億美元蹤影何在?去年,投在美國國內博客廣告上的所有費用,不過區區411萬美元而已。

據eMarkter的研究人員分析,這意味著與去年美國互聯網廣告費237億美元相比,上述金額無異于九牛一毛,而后者在美國整個廣告費2768億美元中所占的份額也極其有限。eMarketer 預計在2012年前,投入博客的廣告費將達到7億4千6百萬美元,同期在線廣告投入總額預計將突破320億美元。去年,投在電子郵件上的廣告比投在博客上的要多,即便如此,也沒有人會將電子郵件看作是下一個能賺大錢媒體經濟。Technorati,一位專門從事博客研究的人士,估計博客版主每年平均能從廣告運營收入中掙到5,060美元,尚不足以從汽車經銷商手中買下一輛法拉利。

廣告商對博客敬而遠之,原因在于其收益有限,且只有為數不多的博客能吸引到足夠的人氣,即使是這類博客,也不得不面對激烈的競爭,其廣告的收益率常慘不忍睹。“許多人降低了對通過大眾媒體來獲取收益的預期”,保羅・弗爾納這位eMarketer的分析師這樣說道“人們尚未找到從某些傳媒中生財的有效方法”,弗爾納還表示,低迷的經濟讓這一切變得更為復雜,但“缺乏明確的商業模式,將會催生出源源不斷的收益。

不可否認,某些博客酷似小型金礦。Gizmodo,一個由Gawker Media運營的小巧網站,上月獲得了高達9800訪客的驚人紀錄,堪稱“日進斗金”。據Gawker 的CEO尼克・丹頓稱,Dooce這個由夫妻檔經營的個人日記類博客,每年的收益在50萬到1百萬之間,這是專為這個網站代理廣告的 Federated Media公司所提供的數據。據阿靈頓稱,TechCrunch的廣告賣了3百萬美元,預計2008還會更多。他表示自己目前考慮出售這家公司,并愿意接受一個比一年前低的報價。

這些成功的故事,讓錢不斷地流入這個地方。就在幾個月前,Huffingto Post拿出了2500萬美元。由蒂拿・布朗領導的Daily Beast,也從巴里・迪勒創辦的InterActiveCorp(互動公司 簡稱IAC)獲得了資助,來充作其十月份的啟動資金(揭秘:迪勒是華盛頓郵政公司的一名董事,該公司擁有大名鼎鼎的新聞周刊)。Huffingto Post和Daily Beast 其實都算不上是真正的博客,它們的媒體分公司碰巧專業對路,而剩下的事,就留給那些博主去完成。某些排名靠前的博主發現:通過自己的勞動來“獲得收益”的最好方法,莫過于重新走回“主流媒體”那種筆調尖酸刻薄的老路,比如政論作家安德魯・沙利文,他的博客名為The Daily Dish(家常菜),設在大西洋月刊的網站上。不食人間煙火的沙利文生活過得愜意無比。但誰又能想像某個家伙穿著睡衣,寫寫博客,就能輕松掙到成百上千萬美元呢?或者想像某位投資家搜羅數十億美元,將賭注押在這個穿睡衣的家伙身上?奉勸做這種美夢的人快快醒來吧!我倒希望它是真實的,可如今它聽起來活象又一個虛幻的高科技童話。