As many of you who live in the United States know, the economy has gotten quite rough over the past year and this means that people are losing their jobs, they are being unable to pay for their cars and homes and its just a tough situation for quite a few people. The big question here is, how does this economic crisis affect bloggers?

Well it seems as though, bloggers are only mildly affected. Since most of our income is derived from advertising, there isn’t really a reduction in clicks or even impressions for that matter. I personally think that advertising networks are showing a bit of a down time as offers are not selling as much as they used to. However, you should remember that when I say down time, its really not that big of a down time compared to some of the other industries such as automakers or the housing market.

The Housing Market
There have been lots of polls recently talking about the housing market and this article on MSN talks about the 5 best and 5 worst housing markets. Surprisingly New York comes in at the best and San Francisco comes in last. One of the states that is actually doing quite well is New Jersey and mainly due to its association with New York. For some of you outside the US, you should know that a lot of people that work in New York, actually live in New Jersey so that means that New Jersey’s economy gets a boost. So much so that they are actually the second wealthiest state in the US. The Real Estate New Jersey is actually on the rise. Aside from that, the top 5 housing markets were pretty much located in the North Eastern part of the US and the worst 5 were spread around a little bit with a majority of them in the Western part of the US.

The Auto Market
Moving on with the subject of down time, I would not be doing my job if I didn’t mention the staggering $9.6 billion dollar loss posted today by General Motors for its quarterly report. Thats a huge hit to stockholders and the US auto market in general. This comes after recent reports that the auto sales have dropped a little over 30% compared to last year. I recently met with some associated at Mercedes Benz and discussed how the recession is affecting their auto sales. The response was not what I had expected. The two sales representatives said the same thing – that their car sales were affected, but only by about 10% at their location and about 12% over the state of Texas. This makes sense, considering that Mercedes announced a slight price increase on some of its vehicles. Sounds a bit crazy, right?

Huge Job Losses
Either way, with the slowing housing market, a drop in US car sales and the highest rate of job losses in a while with December 2008 being the 12th consecutive month in the decline of jobs. With companies going bankrupt, and others cutting back, it is understood that there will be jobs lost. Take a look at this New York Times article from earlier this month that states that almost 600,000 jobs were lost in January 2009 alone. That is a huge loss of jobs and that doesn’t really help boost the economy either.

Does The Economy Affect YOU?
The point is, how does this all affect bloggers? Well, although it seems like this crisis is affecting a lot of people. I really don’t think that bloggers are affected by it as such. I know that I have still seen the same amount of blogs pop up, I’m still seeing large income reports and as far as affiliate marketing goes (maybe Market Leverage can confirm this), I don’t think that they are being affected as drastically as some of the other industries. I know that there are some cutbacks taking place in terms of investing into affiliate marketing and such but that is expected in such an economy. Do you guys think that the economy is affecting your blog and your online investments or projects? I’d like to know and I’m sure others would like to know as well. So, until next time, I’ll be waiting to read your responses. Have a great rest of the week!