“I Earn More than You” – Should You Reveal Blogging Income?

I get a lot of chat messages on Facebook and Google from blog colleagues and acquaintances inquiring about my ‘online earning’.

While some of them who are still stuck in the conventional mentality of success equaled with 9-to-5 job ask about online income quite frowningly, thinking ‘blogging’ is just a fanciful term of jotting down personal opinion online and claiming ‘value’; there are fellow bloggers who inquire the same, not out of real interest but to claim bragging rights – “I earn more than you. You are just a speck of dust”!

On a further serious note, I have seen popular bloggers like Darren Rowse and John Chow cite their income online but they stopped revealing them after some time.

Why Would You Want toReveal Blogging Income?

1. You want to reveal how much you make money online because you seriously want to inspire and motivate others. Revealing the income acts as a proof that, yes, it is possible to make money online, especially from blogging.
2. You want to gain some sort of credibility. There are many bloggers who claim to earn large sums of money, which sounds too good to be true. In such circumstances, feeling the need to establish credibility by displaying your ‘real’ income is justified.

But, hold on….

3. Some people reveal how much is their blogging income is because they want to ‘brag’. Bragging is a serious issue. People post their AdSense income checks on social networks even though Google considers this illegal but bloggers are unmindful of this.

If you are a cynic,

As a cynic, you probably think that the reason why bloggers won’t reveal their income is because they are not making any money online. While a part of this maybe true, but not always.

Should You Reveal Blogging Income?

Personally, I am not comfortable revealing how much I am earning online, whether it is by blogging or by writing, not because I don’t want to motivate people or because I am afraid of competition, I consider whatever I earn as my “own”; I am the “proprietor” and except for the tax department, no one has the right to question this, not even friend and family, unless I am willing disclose it.

Till then, I am happy displaying a Privacy and/or Disclosure Policy on my blog and websites.

Moreover, I feel that once you start revealing your online income, it sort of escalates the expectations of followers and readers – then they want you to earn more, make more money…and you begin to feel unnecessarily pressurized.

To sum up all this…

Why build unnecessary expectations? Isn’t it enough to fulfill your own expectations first? Of course, unless you want to retain your bragging rights, go ahead and brag how much you are earning, but just this – is it really helping anyone?

What do you think?