The Shackles on Bloggers

The Situation
The western anime community lacks A-list bloggers. We have good bloggers, but no blogger is a "household name" among otaku.

The Pattern
Anime bloggers launch a blog and build an audience for about a year or two, then their output drops off.

A few stick around, but many blog sporadically from that point on. Nobody accelerates into stardom.

That's not true in other niches. Other niches have big names in blogs (Arianna Huffington in politics, Robert Scoble and others in tech), people who stick with it and build huge audiences. Why don't we?

The Cause
A blogger will stick around if they can get at least a little money for their efforts. Anime bloggers can't.

Take my case for example. I get a few thousand visitors a month, and I make about $1 a month through ads. Even if I saw 100,000 visitors a month--the generally agreed-upon number at which you've "arrived" as a blogger--at this rate I'd only make $20 or $30 a month. And that's a huge distance away, considering I've already been blogging for over a year and I've posted over 200 articles.

Anime blogs can't get great advertisers. Anime fans don't buy DVDs, and they buy merchandise sporadically from different vendors. A few companies advertise, but it's nowhere near the level of other niches. Why should they? Advertising won't work for them.

So the spiral continues: bloggers can't make significant money, so they hit an output ceiling. Other interests develop. Perhaps they move to Twitter, or perhaps they move on from anime. Combine the lack of income and the harsh reality of Internet Asperger's--to which otaku are particularly prone--and there are few reasons to stick around.

Note: This is not a complaint about my situation, nor a suggestion that I'm going to stop blogging. I'm not discouraged yet. I'm just identifying what appears to me as a common pattern.

(Updated: Ed Sizemore pointed out on Twitter: "I'm wondering if podcasts more than blogs serve that function. They wouldn't have been big on my radar, but I notice all the Otaku USA people started out as podcasters. Also a lot of popular panels at cons are run by podcasters. That's when I started noticing podcasters more.")