Pity the Poor Bloggers

The New York Times had a story about the stress many professional bloggers feel to post all the time. Some are paid piecemeal, some get a cut of advertising revenue, and some get bonuses:

Bloggers at some of the bigger sites say most writers earn about $30,000 a year starting out, and some can make as much as $70,000. A tireless few bloggers reach six figures, and some entrepreneurs in the field have built mini-empires on the Web that are generating hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. Others who are trying to turn blogging into a career say they can end up with just $1,000 a month.

And many more, I'd wager, are paid far less. Why paid so relatively little in a job that may be pushing some of them into an early grave? Because blogging is often the literary equivalent of commodity piece work. Emphasis seems to rest on the number of posts, not their quality. After all, everything essentially goes into the digital dump after, and the sites apparently are trying to get something timely up to grab an advertising audience a split before anyone else to snag the ad dollars. When you're slinging hash, then you must expect to be paid like a short order cook - or possibly not that well.