"The Unemployed Blogger"

acesontop (80)in LeoFinance • 4 years ago

Blogging is one of my most long-lasting and intensive online activity in my whole life. It's somehow a pleasant answer to my life long desire to pour words on paper, although in this case we're talking virtual pages, and it's definitely the type of activity that I would turn into a job, or lets say, the main income source in my life.

I've seen quite often users, especially on Hive and Steem, calling their blogging activity as a job. I guess some have really difficult times in detaching themselves from the employee mindset and they somehow see this type of activity as a job. Well, considering that one can earn cryptocurrencies in form of rewards on dedicated social media platforms such as Hive and Publis0x, and who knows what other dedicated platforms, we can at least for now see blogging on such platform as a part time job.

The main factor that hasn't transformed my blogging activity yet into a real life, consistent income source, is the volatility and current low value of the tokens I'm earning. But could I call this thing a job, and what defining factors would make it a job? Lets see...

First of all, if you work legally you will definitely need a contract with an employer and in this type of activity I definitely don't see anyone handing me a contract with any sort of claims that I or the employer have to respect. Hence it is more like an entrepreneurship rather than a job.

I definitely don't have a boss, and practically I never liked having bosses even when I had the employee badge, but somehow, metaphorically speaking, the likes giving people, or the tribe appreciating one's posts is the actual boss. Payments do come from a rewards pool, but it's the influencers of your posts who decide how big of a share your content gets. Will exclude here self voting and adjacent practices for the sake of painting the picture perfect.

Being an employee implies that you have to have a schedule, working days, or some sort of projects that you have a dead line on, and basically doing a good job will grant one a monthly, or per project payment. As a blogger you don't have to show up at a certain hour everyday, or to put a certain number of posts on your followers feed on a daily or monthly basis, but you have to show up and never give up, and you also have to deliver... sometimes more than 1 minute read posts. There's no time pressure, but there's somehow the consistency pressure, somehow keeping one connected to his blog and tribe almost on a daily basis.

Salary is something that doesn't even needs to be mentioned, as there is no such thing for a blogger, being theoretically a freelance activity, and on top of that I would add that in probably less than two decades from now, even the idea of a monthly payment will be something of the past. As the tokenization concept turns into a process, the somehow fixed monthly income will have no meaning any longer. You have to have a minimum of collected rewards though to make the ends meat, but we can't call those as salary. Rewards seems more appropriate.

And somehow this concept of rewards helps decoupling the human consciousness from a monthly given, in the form of a salary, to a sort of a proof or work/effort/attention, or how I see these internet collectibles that I get from blogging. Again, volatility is an important ingredient that differentiates this activity from a regular job. There's basically no fix income, and also almost no limit to how much one can earn. You could be making $50 a month during the bear market and $5,000 in a bull market and that sounds more like fishing to me... Doing your finances properly definitely plays an important role.

It might not be as time consuming as a regular job, whether working at an office or something else, but it's definitely requiring efforts. Research, writing, editing, engaging and creating yourself a tribe that will somehow guarantee an income from blogging, and managing your finances properly through the market cycles, are definitely worth mentioning.

Bottom line, I don't consider blogging as a job, having a few years of experience as an employee, but I do see some defining factors of a good employee that some bloggers need to assimilate in order to be able to replace a real life job with blogging.

Thanks for attention,
Adrian