If you write a blog and you don't make money, is that a hobby?
 

I'm hoping, one day, in the far off land that I will make money from being a blogger. However, today, I don't. Someone told me because I don't make money that it's a hobby.

So no matter what career path you take, if you don't make money, does that mean it's a hobby?

If you have a blog and have published books, you're a writer.
If you have a blog and have self-published books, you're a self-published writer.
If you have a blog and make money, you're a blogger.
If you have a blog and don't make money, you're a naive blogger.
If you have a blog but don't have an audience besides your buddies, you should just send them all emails instead and eliminate the pretense.

I'd say the difference is intent.

If you're working towards making money, I'd call it a career/work.

If you're blogging and maybe/maybe not going to turn it into a business, it's a hobby.

Hello Bricona, well your friend is right & wrong. What they informed you is a sort of half truth without the big picture.

If you are Blogging & not making money, one can possibly naively consider that only a mere hobby, as a hobby is typically something you are passionate about and would do for free and it only brings you other pleasures besides revenue & profit. A Business is for profit, remember. It doesn't matter if its blogging or selling food out a truck, you want paying customers.

If you have started this Blog of yours out of true passion & purpose with business intents in mind from the outset, then I would say its a business.

Bricona, Your motive & intention is what determines whether or not if your blogging is a business or not, current revenue / lack of revenue has to be considered as well. If its a business did you create a Business Plan, Marketing Plan, Market Research, ......

P.S. 98.9% of ALL personal blogs / bloggers start out NOT making money (whether its the 1st 2 seconds online or 1st 2 years online) Every blogger starts out NOT making money.

If you believe in what you do, are passionate, have traffic coming in, and you are feeding the marketplace something they starve for, that blog, no matter its humble beginnings has the framework of an online business and NOT a hobby. IMHO

If you already have lots of people on your blog & not making money, you need to figure out how to convert those people into paying customers to turn that "hobby" into a business which purpose is to earn profits.

I think your friend is just being realistic. Blogging seems to be like the film industry a few people make a lot of money and everyone else makes a pittance.

If you're "hoping" that you'll make money without any real plan or action towards that goal-yeah, it's a hobby. You'll probably more empowered if you accept your blog as a hobby you do for your own personal pleasure than as something want to make money from eventually.

If you treat your blog like a business - researched your target market (know what their challenge is, have the solution, know they are willing to buy the solution), have a plan for generating traffic, subscribers, and conversions, etc etc. - then it's a business.

If you're just building it and blogging and hoping they will come then it's a hobby.

If your intention is to make money, it's not strictly a hobby.

Hobby: an activity or interest pursued for pleasure or relaxation and not as a main occupation: Her hobbies include stamp-collecting and woodcarving.

It is possible to make some money from a hobby and still consider it a "hobby", but not if it's your primary income.

I would say it is a hobby if you're not making money from it. And it's not a bad hobby, either. I don't currently make any money from my blog, but if I were to place ads on there or affiliate links, it would be against everything I believe in. I have a couple of writers working with me on a book on some of the ideas presented in my blog and I also make a decent living otherwise, although it is not extraordinary money, but it is enough for me to afford what it is I need.

My website is in the 4,000,000's when it comes to traffic, so I'm sure not going to make millions from it at this point, but I do enjoy it, and the people who read it enjoy it as well. I'm not looking to become some sort of blogging superstar, because I know how much work that would take. And, to be honest, it seems a little upstream to me. Placing big ads on the site would be cumbersome and I hate programming with a passion, and ads for that matter. If I were to try and make money from my blog, I'm sure the money would be negligible, like $20 a month, maybe. And what would be the point of that? 99% of people (or more) will never make a living from blogging, and of that less than 1%, many of them make very little, probably less than I make at a job that is only in the $20,000's a year. So, blogging is mostly a supplemental income at best for most of that 1%. Steve is an exception, mostly because of his knowledge and business knowledge. And very original and timeless content.

That is what most bloggers are missing, and it takes a long time to learn all of it. And it takes a ton of self-discipline and willpower. Things that most people simply do not have enough of. I've kept my blog going for at least 4 years, but there has been times when I didn't post more than twice in a month. And my content is all over the place and I just don't care about the money side of it right now, because I know I'm not there yet. Not only that, I find it rather peculiar that most people go into blogging for the money, and not for creative expression.

I'm no blogging expert, but I do see what it takes to have a successful blog. And I don't think I have all those qualities yet. But for now, I'm perfectly glad having my blog be a hobby and not an income-generating source because it is something I enjoy doing and many people (although admittedly not as many as I want) enjoy reading it. If I could break the 1,000,000 mark in terms of traffic ranking in the future, I would totally start trying to earn money from my blog. But I would do it in ways that felt intuitively right to me, such as books I recommend and other things that support my beliefs and actions.

Anyway, good luck to all you hobbyist bloggers on making a living, but don't put all your eggs in that basket until you actually earn money from it.

I wonder if your friend has a tax background? That sounds a lot like what I read about the IRS, that if you have your hobby-business and you file taxes as a business, you need to show income eventually or they can come back and say that you weren't really in business you were just doing a hobby.

If you have a blog and have less than 10 visitors a day, you are 99% of all Wordpress users who try to "hit it big" with blogging.


I've heard similar. You have something like 3-4 years to show some kind of profit to be considered a business. I think it depends on what you are doing.

I honestly don't think that it makes sense to separate activities into hobbies and into work.

One of the activities that I spent a lot of time with is Salsa dancing.
What kind of activity is Salsa?
Sure Salsa is fun.
Salsa has a lot of health benefits which in turn make me more productive in day to day living.
Salsa also provides a nice perspective on human physiology and you could call it field research. It has the potential to inspire academic ideas that I might publish (I'm studying bioinformatics).
I might write an android application that uses the accelerometer data to help you to dance on time and sell that application.
In a few years I might also start teaching dancing on the side.

There are a lot of reason to have a blog besides making money.
1) Having ideas that need an audience
2) Developing writing skills
3) Personal branding
I'm thinking of starting a blog because of #1
The film industry pays the food of a lot of people while blogging pays the food of relatively few people.