Everyone knows that website traffic can be increased using blogs but many might not realise that blogs can make money in other ways - unless you live in the UK apparently.

Ashley Norris, who co-founded Shiny Media - the largest and most successful UK blog network - writes on TechCrunch that people running blog sites in the USA make a living from doing so, and some have even sold their blogs to the likes of AOL for huge amounts.

But in the UK, laments Mr Norris, there are too many factors in the way: far less readers than the USA, a dearth of imagination in the ad industry, a lack of UK media entrepreneurs, a shortage of VC support, too much competition and the BBC.

The BBC comes in for quite a bit of abuse: "There [are] only a certain number of UK web surfers and as the BBC hoovers up a large percentage of them the slice of the cake for the independents is even smaller."

And also: "The BBC's reluctance to link to British blogs and smaller independent media organisations, while at the same time endlessly plugging established media groups makes life even more difficult."

Some would argue that Mr Norris is blaming the BBC for everything short of Britain's relatively small population, but is there really money to be made from blogs aside from search engine optimisation or are the likes of AOL et al just entering another dot.com-style bubble?

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