Chris Wilson writing about his happiness being an unprofessional blogger:

About 10 years ago, I wanted to be a professional blogger. Now I’m happy to be an unprofessional blogger. Well, most of the time at least.

I, too, tried this thing called making money on the internet. At the time it was usually referred to as becoming a writer because a ‘blogger’ was a somewhat pejorative term that writers looked down their nose at. Yet, in the circles I tried to push myself in to, we were all nothing more than bloggers.

This distain still exists in many corners of every day life. There are numerous books published each year by people that are ‘bloggers’ but by publishing a book they can now refer to themselves as a writer — but I digress.

Over the last 12 years of writing online, the most significant change has been the level of income being made. A couple of years in I could maintain a bang average blog, publish a few times a week and receive a couple of hundreds pounds in ad venue back again. More than enough to pay for hosting, invest in some tech to write a bout and have a little extra. If you had a good blog, or wrote for bigger websites, you could easily make a good wage.

As much as I hate online ads, they supported people to do the thing that they enjoyed as a profession — but that ability is now extremely rare. Bloggers are the ones that tell you this doesn’t matter. That they do it for themselves, not for the income. Writers, on the other hand, won’t bother if the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. Being a blogger means that writing online, even when your posts are scruffy and error-prone, is something you do for the enjoyment of it, and that’s the best place to be.