Deseret News | The blogger mom — Salt Lake woman's Web rants from home draw raves and revenue

The blogger mom — Salt Lake woman's Web rants from home draw raves and revenue

By Sue Shellenbarger
The Wall Street Journal

Published: Tuesday, April 15, 2008 12:38 a.m. MDT

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Lots of businesses get hate mail, but few owners react the way Heather Armstrong does. She prints out nasty e-mails, puts them in her driveway and drives over them with her car.

"That's the attitude I have," she said, "and it's made my life a thousand percent better."

Steeling herself against vitriol is one of the challenges of being, by many measures, the nation's top parenting blogger. The 32-year-old at-home mother's irreverent, occasionally profane and often hilarious musings on prosaic topics from potty-training to postpartum depression have propelled her blog, Dooce.com, to No. 59 among the Web's top 100 blogs, according to Technorati, a blog search engine.

The Salt Lake City resident enjoys enviable influence and enough ad revenue that her husband, Jon, quit his job in 2005 to manage advertising for Dooce (rhymes with moose).

Among the Web's 200,000-plus bloggers on parenting and family, few have succeeded to the extent of Heather Armstrong; countless at-home parents would love to be in her position. But less obvious is the behind-the-scenes price an at-home mom pays to shoulder her way to prominence in the blogosphere — giving up her privacy, sustained time off and any remnants of work-family boundaries at all.

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Most powerful individual bloggers, such as Arianna Huffington of HuffingtonPost.com on politics, or Mario Lavandeira of PerezHilton.com on celebrities, keep a measure of personal distance by blogging on public topics. In contrast, Armstrong writes about herself, her husband, her 4-year-old daughter, Leta, clashes with her parents and the escapades of her dog, Chuck. She has the ability "to make the mundane seem interesting," said Pete Blackshaw, an executive vice president at Nielsen Online. In a measure of fans' devotion, a recent post on removing a raccoon from her chimney drew 530 comments.

Mommy blogs in general tend to be everyday diaries of details one might share over coffee — baby's first step or the perils of finding a preschool. Most are blander than Dooce, less humorous and significantly less profane.

Most Web diarists, for example, are too reserved to report, as Armstrong does, that she's "married to a charming geek," had "lived life as an unemployed drunk" for a while, or landed briefly in a mental hospital for postpartum depression. Some mommy-bloggers find her cursing and vulgarity offensive. But it's that outrageousness, humility and raw honesty that also feed her bond with readers, making her dominant in an emerging Web sector Blackshaw calls "The Power Mom."

Armstrong's fan base is a powerful lure for advertisers. Neither she nor her husband will discuss ad revenue, but they and the Internet rating service Quantcast say that Dooce draws about 4 million page views per month. In a "quick back-of-the-envelope guesstimate," Shani Higgins, Technorati's vice president, business development, estimated the site could yield $40,000 a month in revenue from companies coveting her traffic, such as BMW and Verizon.