Why Revenue Sharing is Good for Bloggers

A couple of days ago, I wrote why I believed that revenue sharing is bad for writers. However I've been inspired to also take a look at this from another angle. ProBlogger gets a shout out for this idea, while browsing their site yesterday I came across a couple of articles on the topic of blogging networks.

One was named 'Why Should you Join a Blog Network?', and the other was 'Why You Shouldn't Join a Blog Network'.

This may sound a little counterintuitive at first, but when you stop to consider that as is the case with most things in life, these things tend to have their pros and cons, and neither side has exclusive rights to being the right view.

While revenue sharing is certainly bad for writers, that doesn't mean it's bad in general, and in reality it actually can be a good thing for people who write for a hobby or for extra income, but are not relying on it exclusively.

I personally use many different online sources for paid writing, including Newsvine, Associated Content, my blog, and a few other sites that pay not in cash but in exposure to a level of readership that few can attain no matter how long or how hard they try. DailyKos is a great example, where there is no potential to earn money from what you write, but if you make the front page, you can have your writings and name introduced to anywhere between 20,000-40,000 new people in a single day.

If you are one of the people that write for fun or reasons other than work, it's understandable that you'd look favorably on getting paid for doing what you don't consider to be real work. After all, how can you compare sitting at a computer for an hour and typing in a word processor about what your favorite movie is to something physical demanding and stressful like construction?

The similarity isn't immediately obvious unless you've tried to do both, but let me assure you that writing becomes exceedingly more difficult when you have deadlines, and aren't allowed to work only when the muse decides to bless you on some particular afternoon.