In his weekly column for Wired, NYU assistant professor Adam Penenberg asks a question on the minds of many bloggers: Is it possible to strike it rich while blogging? Penenberg digs around several weblog publishers, looking for answers.

At Weblogs, Inc. (the weblog empire run by former New York-based Internet promoter Jason Calacanis), bloggers make anywhere from $200 to $3,000 a month - "about a quarter to half what a mid-level editorial job would pay, without the daily office commute." The standard deal appears to be $500 for about 125 entries a month ($4/entry).

At Gawker Media, the figures are a bit higher: "The amount floating around the internet is $2,500 a month per blogger plus traffic bonuses." Not satisfied with this estimate, Penenberg does the math and comes up with a number of wildly-inflated numbers for the various bloggers at Gawker Media: $5,000 a month (Gawker), $7,000 to $10,000 a month (Defamer), $7,000 to $8,000 (Gizmodo) and $7,000 to $8,000 a month (Fleshbot).

As it turns out, New York Magazine had the final say. In last week's issue on "Who makes what" in New York City, Jessica Coen of Gawker admitted to making $30,000 per year . That works out to about $2,500 a month.