What can 10 of the top-earning bloggers in 2020 teach us about how to make money by blogging, and what do their stories tell us about the current trends of top-ranking blogs?
Since 2018, Target Internet has checked in once a year on ten of the world’s highest-earning blogs. Using a list based on a Forbes ranking of the world’s highest earning bloggers, we analysed some of the factors playing into each leading blogger’s success.
Recently, blogging has branched into lots of variants, ranging from traditional, proprietary blogs (like the one you are reading), to blogging on third-party platforms such as Medium and LinkedIn Pulse, and micro-blogging in social media captions. There has been a further bifurcation of the blogging industry into bloggers and social media influencers. A lot of people who may once have become bloggers, are pursuing careers as influencers instead.
These trends have brought new commercial and creative opportunities for independent online content creators. The downside is that blogging has become harder to define, and therefore harder to report on as an industry. This effect has been so pronounced that use of the term ‘blogging’ itself seems to be waning. According to Google Trends, global search volume around ‘blogging’ and related keywords reached its lowest level on record in June 2019, and has been close to flat since then.
One of the upshots of these trends is that it is no longer easy to get estimates on bloggers’ earnings from a reputable source, as titles like Forbes have refocused on trending topics like Instagrammers and YouTubers. We might have taken this as our cue to stop analysing the performance of top paid bloggers. However, we’ve been keeping track of the careers of the bloggers included in last year’s list, we still believe there’s a lot to say about their high-earning blogs. Let’s take a good look at each leading blog’s status in 2020, and see what lessons we can take away about the state of blogging.
The earnings figures given with each blogger are best-available estimates of annual earnings from Owler, given in U.S. dollars.
Top 10 highest-earning bloggers
- HuffPost: $500 million per year
- Engadget: $47.5 million per year
- Moz: $44.9 million per year
- PerezHilton: $41.3 million per year
- Copyblogger: $33.1 million per year
- Mashable: $30 million per year
- TechCrunch: $22.5 million per year
- Envato Tuts+: $10 million per year
- Smashing Magazine: $5.2 million per year
- Gizmodo: $4.8 million per year