Blogger Mom Rants Her Way To A Hefty Income
Lots of businesses get hate mail, but few owners react the way Heather Armstrong does. She prints out nasty e-mails, puts them in her driveway and drives over them with her car.
“That’s the attitude I have,” she said, “and it’s made my life a thousand percent better.”
Steeling herself against vitriol is one of the challenges of being, by many measures, the nation’s top parenting blogger. The 32-year-old at-home mother’s irreverent, occasionally profane and often hilarious musings on prosaic topics from potty-training to postpartum depression have propelled her blog, Dooce.com, to No. 59 among the Web’s top 100 blogs, according to Technorati, a blog search engine.
The Salt Lake City resident enjoys enviable influence and enough ad revenue that her husband, Jon, quit his job in 2005 to manage advertising for Dooce (rhymes with moose).
Among the Web’s 200,000-plus bloggers on parenting and family, few have succeeded to the extent of Heather Armstrong; countless at-home parents would love to be in her position. But less obvious is the behind-the-scenes price an at-home mom pays to shoulder her way to prominence in the blogosphere — giving up her privacy, sustained time off and any remnants of work-family boundaries at all.
Armstrong’s fan base is a powerful lure for advertisers. Neither she nor her husband will discuss ad revenue, but they and the Internet rating service Quantcast say that Dooce draws about 4 million page views per month. In a “quick back-of-the-envelope guesstimate,” Shani Higgins, Technorati’s vice president, business development, estimated the site could yield $40,000 a month in revenue from companies coveting her traffic, such as BMW and Verizon.
No comments yet.
Leave a Reply