I’m kind of surprised I did not see this earlier, but today I stumbled upon B.L. Ochman’s interview with Hugh MacLeod of Gaping Void. Hugh supports himself with income from blogvertising. He resides in rural England, where his rent is one fifteeenth of what he paid in New York. He says he makes close to what he made in New York as a copywriter. I don’t know what Hugh made, but copywriters can be paid pretty well in New York. They can also slave for tuna casserole money, but that’s a story for another day. In this story, Hugh looks out his window and sees rhodendrum bushes in bloom—a marked contrast to his stark images that strike to the very core of business matter.
When you think about it, every company needs a Hugh, but Hugh’s are oh so hard to employ.
Ochman calls him the “Poster Child for Unemployed Creative Types Seeking Blog Fame and Fortune.” While this poster may never rival the Farrah poster I had in Junior High, it’s a nice poster all the same.
She also reveals:
Blogging since 2003, and online since 2001, Macleod’s blog is the fourth most popular blog in Europe, second most popular in the UK, and Number 139 worldwide. Not bad for one guy writing in an English countryside cottage.
He gets “just shy of a million page views a month,” a remarkable number for a blog with 14-15,000 unique visitors a day, up exponentially from about 3,000 a day for most of last year. The edgy, often outrageous, frequently x-rated cartoons about blogging, marketing, and life that pepper his blog have earned him a virally generated, global following.
