Blogging, so much a part of daily lives today, actually took a while to catch on before becoming enormously successful – practically overnight. Blogging began to rapidly spread in 1999 and shortly thereafter thanks to a few nearly-simultaneous creations of blog tools: Open Diary (1998), LiveJournal (1999), Pitas.com (1999), and Blogger.com (1999).
In 1997, John Bargerm, editor of Robot Wisdom, coined the term “web-log” while attempting to describe the daily list of sites that he “logged” onto during his web travels. A few years later Peter Merholz used the word in his sidebar but made the creative decision to split the word into two: we blog. It wasn’t long after that, that Evan Williams at Pyra Labs began using the word “blog” on its own as both a verb and a noun, before finally creating the term “blogging” in association with Pyra Labs’ Blogger product.
Today, blogging is more than a familiar term. Many of us interact with blogs on a daily basis in one way or another; whether we write our own blogs, contribute to a blog, or just enjoy reading and commenting on them, blogs are huge part of the online experience.
Many people have chosen to make blogging their lifestyle, and their livelihood. And as we delve into the earnings associated with the top ten bloggers in the world today, it becomes clear why these people decided to make the success of their blog down their career path. Blogging, as a profession, has proven to be quite lucrative but not many people realize just how lucrative a successful blogging career can be.
However, creating a wildly successful, lucrative blog is no easy feat. The blogosphere is competitive, and it takes an extreme amount of dedication, a fair amount of talent, a good amount of business sense, and a whole bunch of luck for a blog to become one of the most popular in the cyberverse.
With 33.9 million new blogs being created every month and over 60,328,496 blogs on sites like WordPress.com, the following blogging stars have truly emerged from the masses and have risen to the top of the blogosphere for a great many reasons. One thing they all have in common, though; none of these bloggers would have attained this level of influence and wealth if they didn’t have drive, passion and expertise in their respective niches.
