Technorati has released its 5th State of the (Blog)Nation report this week. We of course are fascinated by The Money and how it cascades down the Long Tail, (see initial post here) and the main piece on that will be in Day 4 of the report, tomorrow. Day 3 had an interesting table on expenditure on blogging:

Blog Spend from Technorati

What is somewhat interesting is the huge difference in average spend between European and the US & Asian blogs – $2k vs sub $1k. This is all the more intriguing given the extremely low median spend of European blogs. The implication (given that spend is clearly a strong poisson or power law distribution) is that a small number of Euroblogs are spending a fortune compared to both the US and Asian Pro-Blogger and the average euroblogger’s pittance.

The piece of value left out here, however, is the time element. The study also shows that 2/3 of bloggers spend c 4 hours+ a week at it, so over a year thats c 200 hours (assuming that one does not blog on vacation), which, at say $50 an hour (c $350 a day, c $70k pa) is an input of c $10k pa. 45% of bloggers do double this, ie a labour input of c $20k pa. Of course, I could be massively overestimating the market value of bloggers, so assume $35k pa and its $5k and $10k respectively – still a far larger input than any of the above material investments.

The reason for this – as TechCrunch notes, success in blogging is not about beautifully crafted writing or erudite knowledge – the quality is nearly all in the quantity:

Blogging is a volume game. The more you post, the more chances there are that someone else will link to one of your posts. (Technorati rank is based on the number of recent links to your blog). The majority of the Top 100 blogs tracked by Technorati post five or more times per day, and a full 43 percent post more than 10 times per day. Meanwhile, 64 percent of the 5,000 blogs ranked lower than 600 post two to four times a day, which is still a serious commitment

Lying down a bit with the stats here allows me to calculate that the average blog post takes roughly an hour therefore, probably a bit less…….(this one, if you are interested, took 29 minutes in which 1 cup of coffee was also produced and consumed)