Now here's some great news for hobby bloggers.
Karin, laid off from her job at a legal firm in New York, moved to St. Louis and started up a food blog writing about restaurant promotions for the area called, STL Meal Deals back in April.
She monetized the blog with Google Adsense and was earning approximately $1.30 per day from the ads. She reported those earnings (a whopping $100 check received 3 months after she started the blog) to the New York Department of Labor.
According to the NY DOL, if you work at least one day and receive compensation for that work, your benefits will be cut a minimum of 25%, and if that compensation exceeds you unemployment compensation, your benefits for the week will be cut to $0.00.
That's what happened to Karin. Her benefits were cut completely on the grounds that she was “self-employedâ€, that her AdSense income was reportable and that she was in fact “working†every time she updated her blog.
Karin was smart. She called David Randall at Forbes and told him her story.
David got on the case and phoned the New York Department of Labor several times, then wrote about Karin's plight on October 7th.
On October 15th, Karin posted a thank-you note on her blog, and adds:
Since the article was originally written, I have been informed that my benefits will, in fact, be reinstated! The final decision was that my blog was not a business and was not being run for profit but instead was being used to help build a portfolio that could be used to apply for jobs in non-legal careers. Since the income generated from the blog is not income generated from “work,” in their defined sense, the Adsense income does not need to be reported. If, however, I ever were to decide to conduct my blog as a business and accept money from restaurants in exchange for putting advertisements on my site, their opinion would change, and that money would have to be reported. Hopefully this explanation puts to rest anybody's concerns about their own blog, and I haven't deterred anybody.
That's excellent news for Karin.
After looking around her blog however, I would hope that Karin would consider becoming a full-time blogger, i.e. moving off Blogger.com and taking paid advertising in addition to Google. She's a great writer and there's no reason she wouldn't be able to match or exceed the $405 per week in unemployment benefits that she is currently receiving.
Go for it, Karin! 🙂