A liberal blogger discovers, to her chagrin, that conservative bloggers take care of themselves. Here's a hint: it has nothing to do with banging a tin cup and asking other people to beg for money on your behalf.

It should come as no shock that for a blog to be both popular and good, it requires a great deal of time and effort on the part of the host. When I first started this site, back in April, 2002, it seemed that most of the people doing this sort of thing were either freelance journalists, professors, college students, or lawyers with their own practice. That is to say, bloggers were people who already wrote for a living, and who had the time to post frequently and write deliberatively. To them, blogging was a hobby that could supplement their normal routine.

Once blogging became "hip", it drew in a lot of people who had writing talent, and were not in any of those professions. Those bloggers included a tremrndous amount of undiscovered talent, but only a few who will ever be hired to write for a living. As a result, once the high of writing something for a public audience wore off, making money off this gig became paramount for the neophyte. Unfortunately, bloggers don't have anything to sell but their work product, so unless you can find a sugardaddy willing to support you, or happen to be independently wealthy, you better be writing about something that can turn a profit for somebody else.

With almost no exceptions, political blogs can't turn the trick. Moreover, perhaps inevitably considering the string of recent defeats Democrats had in the aftermath of the 2000 election, liberal blogging has become dominated by a style of rhetoric that ensured that such blogs would never make mucho dinero: an in-your-face, abrasive, attack-oriented style that focused most of its wrath primarily on the media, and secondarily on the Bushies and neocons. People who were comfortable with the status quo weren't going to turn to this newfangled medium anyway, but for the significant number of people who weren't, those blogs were a godsend. The more extreme the invective, the more rhetorically violent the site, the greater the page visits. While it was cathartic to finally have someone take the fight to the other side, it does tend to be even less successful in generating a cash stream than it has been in winning elections.

And alternatively, bloggers who hoped to use their access to this public forum to formulate policy alternatives got the short end. Ironically, it was the bloggers who actually had something, in the form of ideas and policy prescriptions, that might be of value to the marketplace, that lacked the volume of traffic necessary to make the sale, while the ones who did have the traffic only sold snark and invective, products that nobody's buying.