Dilbert Creator Going for the Bucks; Will Blog Less
Sunday, December 2nd, 2007Scott Adams says he started blogging regularly for the money, to build an audience for Dilbert, satisfaction, and to put his best posts in a book.
Since none of the four has worked out, he’s backing off his daily posts.
“Readership of ‘The Dilbert Blog’ is growing rapidly, but at about the same rate people figure out how to use RSS feeds to get the content without the ads,” he wrote. “So there’s no longer a correlation between how hard I work and the ad income I earn. It topped out at ‘trivial,’ even while the audience grew to substantial.”
He was also upset that people threatened to stop reading Dilbert because a blog post offended them. He explained that people couldn’t tell if he was kidding or not.
Adams said it didn’t make sense to knock himself out blogging when it wasn’t generating enough income.
“That’s why I will continue blogging, albeit less controversially. I’ll just do it less often, especially over the holidays. It’s hard to tell the family I can’t spend time with them because I need to create free content on the Internet that will lower our income.”
Adams often took positions opposite of the popular positions just to make for good humor. He said that they key to his writing often was to figure out what seemed to be just common good sense, and try to take the opposite approach with a reasoned and intelligent argument.
It’s too bad some people didn’t get it. I’ll miss his writing.
