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166 Frames of Fame

“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes,” Andy Warhol famously said in 1968.Turns out, four decades into the future, the tomato can and Marilyn Monroe pop artist was an optimist.
Written by Tom Steinert-Threlkeld, Contributor

“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes,” Andy Warhol famously said in 1968.

Turns out, four decades into the future, the tomato can and Marilyn Monroe pop artist was an optimist.

Now, anyone and everyone who wants to be is a global publisher, via the Internet. And anyone and everyone gets to be the subject, at some point, of this worldwide thought-dispersal machinery.

As a result, your slice of fame is likely to last about 166 frames, aka page views.

Here are the latest stats on the ubiquity of blogging, supplied by Technorati, the search engine devoted to blogs.

-- 9.9% of "all" blogs or 7.4 million have been updated in the last 90 days. -- 5.2 million have been updated in the last 60 days -- 3.6 million have been updated in the last 30 days -- 1.5 million have been updated in the last week

To these blogs get added:

--571,000 new posts in 24 hours --2.13 million posts in 7 days

Which means that, even among active blogs, 1.4 posts get added a week, or about 6 a month. That is roughly 9 million new posts all told each month.

If you then take another couple stats from comScore, you find that 77 million folks in the U.S. visit blogs each month and 1.5 billion page views are generated by the activity.

Which roughly speaking means each of those 9 million posts a month generates 166 page views.

So much for fame. And the fortune part? If Gawker’s declining pay scale is any indication, it’s getting a lot tougher to achieve.

Gawker writers used to get paid $7.50 per thousand page views, when the year started. That went to $6.50 at the start of the third quarter to $5. And could go lower.

Gawker generates about 16 million or 17 million page views a month. So it’s actually at the head of the pack in generating reasonable revenue for individual bloggers. One of its bloggers, Richard Lawson, is reported by Portfolio to have made nearly $10,000 a month in the second quarter.

Sound like a reasonable goal?

At Gawker Media’s latest rates, that means: Generate 2 million page views a month.

That would make you famous, if you figure out how to achieve it on your own. Because, at going rates, it’d take you 12,000 posts a month, at 166 page views apiece, to get there.

Warhol’s secret? Appeal to pop culture or base instincts. Much like Gawker (Defamer, Fleshbot).

But even there, downward pressure clearly is on. In blogging, both fame and fortune remain largely elusive.

PHOTO SOURCE: Photobucket

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