2017 State of the Blogging Industry

In early 2016, two members of the ConvertKit team were at a conference, listening to a talk about the state of the speaker’s industry.

The speaker had no advanced degree in the topic at hand, no specific credentials that gave him absolute authority to speak for the industry and no advanced training in data analysis. And yet, there he was, speaking confidently and with authority on the state of an entire industry.

In that moment, our team had an idea: ConvertKit should create an annual report on the state of the blogging industry. We have the right customers (professional bloggers), we have the ability to tell stories, and we know the industry well enough to do it well.

This report has come to life thanks to the 850+ bloggers who took more than 20 minutes of their time to tell us about the ins and outs of their blogs and businesses. We asked them to share everything from their detailed income numbers to their biggest struggles to the motivations that keep them going everyday.

In the process, we learned so much about the industry we serve and we’re excited to share those results with you in the form of this report, The State of the Blogging Industry 2017.

In other words, we're excited to tell the story of the blogging industry and we hope you'll take your time digesting the information - referring back to the data as you need it and reading it in multiple sittings rather than trying to cram it in all at once.

You can read the report in two different formats:

1. We’ve created an interactive online version of the report, which starts on this page and makes it easy to continue reading without leaving this site.
2. We’ve also created a downloadable PDF version which you can download here in exchange for your email address; we promise we’ll take good care of it and send you only the content you want beyond the report.

We hope you enjoy the report and we invite you to share the findings with your own audience. We simply ask you to point back to the original report here so others can get the full context if they choose.

Now, before we dive in, we know some of you will want the TLDR; version (too long, didn’t read) of the report. You can click straight through to the high level summary. Or, if you'd rather not ruin the surprise, you can go ahead and dive in with Part 1: The People..

One final note before we get started: while accurate data points often include decimals for specificity, we want this report to be easy to read and digest. With that in mind, we’ve rounded nearly every data point to the closest percentage. For example, if something was 38.74%, it reads as 39% here. The exception is where rounding to the closest percentage would have left us with 0%. In that case, a decimal point value is assigned. We hope this makes the report easy to read and share. Thanks for your understanding.

- Barrett Brooks and The ConvertKit Team