A blog focused on helping bloggers and online retailers make more money online.

Blogs used to be on the fringe of the web, but they’ve matured. Today, they’re the new mainstream. In other words, the days of riding the bus in the minor leagues are over. Many blogs are going pro. And that carries with it some important ramifications.

That was a key discussion point at the BlogWorld 2009 conference that I attended recently in Las Vegas. As Richard Jalichandra CEO of Technorati pointed out in her “State of the Blogosphere” presentation, blogs are today’s media. Not only are the professional ones bringing in the readers, they’re bringing in the cash, too.

Look at the demographics. Technorati’s independent research suggests that bloggers in 2009 are predominantly hobbyists (72%) or part-timers (15%). Only 4% of bloggers are corporations. These publishers are predominantly college-educated males. No real surprise there.

Here’s where it gets interesting. An estimated 17% of those surveyed indicated blogging as their primary source of income. That’s a lot of people.

So how are the pros making it work? Well, experience helps. Some 40% indicated having been previously employed by traditional media. Persistence matters, too. Some 30% indicated they spent more than 10 hours a week on their blog.

Investing wisely in how your blog looks and generates income is crucial. The pros spent seven times more money than hobbyists, and the top 5,000 blogs generated 100 times more posts. And what about monetization? It might be tempting to assume that in 2009 running ads continues to play a big role in turning content into cash. But Technorati’s research suggests there’s more to it than that.

They found that in 2008, nearly seven out of every ten bloggers had Google AdSense running on their site to generate income. In 2009, however, that ratio has dropped to nearly four in ten.

That’s a significant drop. So why is it happening? Because bloggers listen to their readers. And readers get annoyed by text ads that are irrelevant to their needs or interests. Professional bloggers are instead finding better tools that help them generate money through contextually relevant advertising while pulling in more and more satisfied readers.

All of which to say that these trends affirm what we know here at AffinityClick from our own market research. Professional bloggers want their readers to have the best of everything, including great content supported by product suggestions that are relevant to the needs of their readers. And that’s a recipe for success that can work for everyone.

This year online advertising spending is expected to be down for 2009 since 2002, the hangover from the internet-bubble years.

Spending on online advertising is expected to come in at $22.8 billion in 2009 in the U.S., down 2.9% from a year ago, due to steep declines in sponsorships, classifieds and e-mail advertising, according to a projection from eMarketer issued Monday. Banner ads were virtually flat with 2008.

Search, which will grow 4% overall, proving itself the most resilient and counter-cyclical form of online marketing. Video also grew, but it’s still too small to make a difference in the overall numbers.

EMarketer’s latest figures come two weeks after the Internet Advertising Bureau said online ads declined 5% in the first six month of 2009. eMarketer benchmarks its figures on the IAB and uses it as a base for its projections for the second half of the year.  Increasingly, search drives the online ad market, and in the U.S., it is more than double the size of online display.

About a quarter of all online advertising in the U.S. flows through Google, and its strong showing was enough to fuel a slight recovery in the second half of 2009. “The trend here is clearly up and that alone will support a mild rebound in the second half,” David Hallerman, an analyst said.

Search is both a real-time indicator of marketer sentiment and the sentiment of consumers, who are doing more commercial-related searches. Mr. Hallerman, like a lot of analysts and marketers, believes the economy hit bottom earlier this year.

Broadly speaking, the display ad market is challenged by the economic cycle, but also the fact that the largest Ad Age 100 advertisers are still allocating small percentages to online marketing. Online gets less than 10% of ad spending in the U.S. “The dollars still aren’t following the eyeballs online,” Mr. Hallerman said.

Researchers that question the value of the click as a metric of advertising success can add another datapoint to their arguments.comScore and Starcom USA have followed up a July 2007 study conducted with Tacoda that segments Internet users into heavy, moderate and light clickers and found that a decreasing percentage of users are making up an increasing portion of all click-throughs.

Heavy clickers only accounted for 4% of all Internet users in March 2009, but they were responsible for more than two-thirds of click-throughs that month. Both moderate and light clickers decreased in number and in share of clicks.

What’s more, nonclickers rose as a proportion of all Internet users by 16 percentage points. With just 16% of Web users clicking on ads in March, how informative are click-through rates?

“A click means nothing, earns no revenue and creates no brand equity. Your online advertising has some goal—and it’s certainly not to generate clicks,” said John Lowell, Starcom USA SVP and director, research and analytics, in a statement.

Marketers and researchers have suggested other metrics, such as the view-through rate, gross ratings points (GRPs) and dwell time as more appropriate gauges of success.

“It’s not the right metric,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni of the click in a May 2009 interview with eMarketer. “It’s a really short-term view of how advertising works as a direct-response-oriented vehicle and not a branding-oriented one.”