Philly to Bloggers: Pay Up

The City of Philadelphia is demanding that any blogger who makes even the slightest amount of money pay a $50 annual (or $300 lifetime) fee. That's a pretty high number given how little most bloggers actually make off of their sites.

The Philadelphia City Paper has posted a clarification of their story given the way it's blown up. Let's take a look at item 2) on their list.

2.) The city does not tax all blogs; rather, just the ones make some money or, at least, have the potential to make some money. So, in that sense, it's not really an attack on speech, per se.

Almost every blogger I've seen has ads on their site. With the exception of the big guys like Hot Air, Michelle Malkin or The Daily Kos, bloggers are not making any money off their sites. Few of them even make enough to break even. Let me use myself as an example.

I'm a really small time blogger. I started out with my tech site (which I'm slowly trying to resurrect), and then added this blog for all of my non-tech stuff. (It's almost all politics all the time now.)

If I recall correctly, I started putting ads on my sites in 2004. Mostly, it's been Google AdSense but I've recently become an affiliate for several retailers. The most obvious being the Amazon and Barnes and Noble programs which I've used for the book recommendation on the right. In that entire time, I've made around $100 which was a payment from Google a couple of years ago. Google only pays out every $100 and I've only hit that once.

If I had to pay Philly's Blogger Tax, I'd be paying them for the privilege of blogging. The cost of the license is more than I have any hope of making in any normal year. Now, I doubt that I would stop blogging if I had to pay that but there are other bloggers who might not be able to.

Thanks to sites like Blogger, Live Journal and Facebook, anyone can put up a blog for free. They don't even need a computer or Internet access at home if they have a well equipped library near by. For those people, Philly's tax absolutely stifles their speech on-line.

I also find it laughable in the clarification how Jeffrey Billman compares freelance writing to blogging. I will almost guarantee that Billman makes more from each story he sells than I have in the entire time I've had ads on my site.

Just another reason I'm happy to not live in Philadelphia.