I know (somewhere deep inside) that blogging is important. But I'm not sure why. Some forensic economics and the post entitled "Bloggers, Your World Awaits" from How to Save the World can help clarify this.
This post contains a lot of data about blog readership, and some excellent extrapolations of known statistics. According to the table therein, I am somewhat better received than a typical C-list, and somewhere below the typical B-list blogger (which makes me feel great since I don't have any porn on my site). Let me be modest and round down to the C-list.
Worldwide, the typical C-list blogger gets read for about 13 person-hours per day. I think most of my readers are American, but I'll also use the lowball statistic from the article that 40% of readers are American. The last piece of information is that the average wage in the U.S. is about $13/hr. Putting these together (13 x 0.4 x 13) suggests that my blog writing is producing value added of no less than $68/day.
Let's compare that to my academic job. Using my 9 month salary, and assuming two 18 week semesters (so that includes, retreats, grading, commencement and so on), and 40 hours per week during that time, my university values my time at about $50/hr.
So there you have it: the non-monetary valuation placed on blogging by the market is substantially higher than the monetary valuation placed on me by my employer. Of course, I am providing most of that blogging value as consumer surplus to my readers, but I now have some idea of how hard I should be working them over to convert that into producer surplus.
I'd be remiss if I didn't quote one of the comparisons made by the source post that got my attention:
...in three years the average B-list blogger will be getting significantly more reader attention than the average unsyndicated US newspaper article or column, and the average A-list blogger will be getting almost as much reader attention as the average US daily paper.
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