Romanian bloggers earned around Euro 300,000 in 2009 – study

Romanian bloggers started to monetize their online influence, their earnings from blogging reaching somewhere around the amount of Euro 300,000 in 2009, according to a study realized by Romanian specialized blog refresh.ro and the blog advertising agency Standout.

BR2009 study, realized from December 7th 2009 to January 7th 2010, was made with the help of 720 Romanian bloggers.

Only 25% from the respondents said that they earned money from blogging, while 3% of them said their blogs are their main source of revenues.

10% of the bloggers that entered the study made last year over Euro 1,000 from blogging, which suggest the value of the Romanian blogging market is somewhere around Euro 300,000.

Also, according to estimates, the revenues from blogging might double in 2010, taking in consideration the number of campaigns and the number of important brands that included blogs in their marketing strategy.

To earn from their blogs, 25% of Romanian bloggers ran display/branding campaigns, 18% published paid articles and 15% earned from affiliate marketing. Also, last year, 4% of Romanian bloggers had their blogs branded and 4% sold advertising in their RSS feeds, while 63% didn’t know, at the moment the study was made, how many subscribers they had in RSS feeds.

Also,43% of the bloggers invested money in blogging,3% using for their blogs budgets of over Euro 1,000, most of them (41%) for hosting and web domains. Also, 8% spent on marketing and advertising and 3% in people.

80% of the Romanian bloggers that took part in the study have Twitter accounts  (77% public accounts and 3% private accounts), 57% have links on their blogs towards their Twitter accounts and 24% use apps that publish automatically the blog articles on Twitter.

In bloggers’ social network top of preferences, Twitter is followed by Facebook, LinkedIn, Hi5, Neogen, MySpace, DeviantArt, Netlog, and others.

Also, the study found out that 77% of Romanian bloggers are aged 18 to 44, 79% finished or are still attending the University and 44% live in Bucharest.

Out of the 720 bloggers questioned, 10% started blogging before 2006, 29% are writing also on a niche blog and 8% – on their company blog. Also, 19% of them are spending over 3 hours a day blogging.

In what concerns the frequency, 29% of the questioned bloggers are writing daily. Also, 76% of bloggers think political subjects had the biggest impact last year, while 62% write about brands and their products and services. Also, 8% of them are using the mobile phone for different activities related to blogging.