I have two blogs. They are inactive, contain no real content, and probably have had a hundred hits between them apart from me. If blogs such as those, or the one I maintained for a while in high school which had exclusively local and personal content on it, are counted in the long tail, then it would not surprise me at all that you would need to get past the 95th percentile to see any substantial (financial) success.
I suspect there are three fundamentals to blogging, in no order:
- Self-promotion
- Style / Marketing
- Output (effort, quantity, maybe quality).
Of these, effort is the most visible, easiest to learn, and easiest to control, so that's where most amateurs direct their attention. However, a blog with style attracts and retains readers far more readily than a blog with the same basic material, but that is incomplete, incoherent, pretentious, or worst of all - boring. And a blog which is thoroughly promoted will necessarily do much better than one that is not. I would suggest that good self-promotion can go a long way to compensating for lack of content or lack of style or marketing strategy.
Luck plays a factor which is unquantifiable, as it always does in every facet of life. However, luck mostly brings about opportunities to succeed - it does not breed success on its own. Effort is always required to convert the opportunities luck brings about into success - hence sayings such as "fortune favours the bold / prepared", "the harder you work, the luckier you get", etc.
If you treat blogging as a career, as online journalism or similar, and dedicate three to five years of full-time effort to it (or equivalent), and still don't succeed (ie making a living)? Frankly, I would consider you an anomaly. But most people don't dedicate anywhere near that kind of time or effort. There's still the misapprehension that blogging/vlogging/online media in general is the Wild West it was in the late 90s and early 2000s, which it is not; it has matured. Not to say you can't break through, merely that it's no longer possible for a rank amateur to slap together a webpage and have the world beat a path to their door waving Adsense dollars and affiliate links at them. How do I know? I have one. I had (have?) the dream too. Unfortunately, I am even lazier than my writing posts at 3:45am on a Friday morning would suggest. But I am absolutely certain that if I decided to write about personal finance from an Australian perspective with a healthy dollop of sarcasm, social commentary and political analysis, there would be people interested in that - and I could make money off it. But it's not as simple as "I'll write some shit down and make a million dollars".
Look at the infographic again: 9% of the survey, 90 bloggers, had 'freedom' to derive their main income from their blog. But 81%, or 810 of them, made less than $100 total from blogging. So if you exclude the amateurs, experimenters, weekend projects that got forgotten, and focus on the people who did actually try to make money blogging? 90 of the 190 who made $100 from blogging also made enough to get by. That's 47% of those who've experienced even minimal success. And there's no way of knowing how many of the 53% above $100 are on their way to 'making it' themselves. They could be anywhere from $100 total to $100 a month to $500 a month, which is an awfully large gap.
Or consider the survey at
http://goo.gl/NX3Aqv. That survey found that 11% of bloggers were making over $1k a month, which I'd consider living money. Moreover, another 7% were between $500-$999 a month (in other words, getting there), and that 85% of those who were making $10k+ a month had been at it for four years, and a vague 'most of the rest' for three years.
It's just like the crowds of people who turn up to audition at pop-music reality tv shows without a day's vocal training or practice, or the every third or fourth person who thinks they have a novel in them, but neither read nor write regularly. There's always going to be a long tail of crap - Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap. Or the Pareto principle: the value of many activities follows a power law.
So no, I disagree with the argument that a blogger these days needs to be 'lucky' to get by. I will definitely concede luck helps a lot (it can cut a year or more off your rise to modest success, or be the springboard from success to notoriety), but it is not a necessary precondition. It is far more important, as with all things in life, to have a purpose, to plan, and to execute ruthlessly and repeatedly until you get what you want.
I think it should be evident by now I've read too many self-help books, 'getting things done' books, and articles about self-empowerment and success. I think I'll go lie down and avoid writing my novel now. Fuck.