My blog is essentially my journal; no one else reads it. However, knowing someone else _might_ read it is making me spend the effort to write in better style, to watch my language, so I would not be embarrassed by myself. That's the value of blog over journal for me.

It sounds like the presumption that you would do this for money is the problem here—you don't have to "beg for scraps" if it's just a hobby done for fun.

...which is probably the most succinct way of describing where our dear Old Net has gone: swallowed up by the razor-thin margins of the professional creative economy.