Technorati Founder David Sifry told MarketWatch the increasing number of blog hosting services that split advertising revenue with bloggers means that thousands of bloggers are making money. The number of people who live entirely off their blog income are only in the "low thousands," Sifry said. "But there are hundreds of thousands of bloggers who do make enough to pay their bills for bandwidth."

One example is ReviewMe, which launched today. ReviewMe pays bloggers to write about products and services. The site uses algorithms and statistics from Technorati.com, Alexa and other blog-traffic measurement services to determine how much a blogger is paid. (Read more from TechCrunch.)

But partnering with advertisers isn’t the only way bloggers can make money. Syndication and licensing services are popping up.

Lisensa is a copyright registration service that “will help bloggers syndicate out their content, with or without a fee, to third parties who would like to use it legally,” according to a TechCrunch posting. Yepic also allows bloggers to sell their articles to other Web sites. Bloggers can also purchase postings for their own blogs. According to the Web site, Yepic was created to give bloggers more incentive to write in-depth articles. (See this Fast Company article and Yepic for more on how it works.)

A quick Google search for “blog sponsor” shows there is no shortage of bloggers looking for advertisers or sponsors. According to Buzz Marketing with Blogs, the companion Web site for a companion “For Dummies” book on the same subject, “Sponsorships are a promising model for blog revenue-building, especially for those who reach a specialized niche audience, but don’t have the traffic numbers of some of the big name bloggers.”

So far, it seems, newspapers are largely using their own staff to blog or paying only a nominal fee for freelancers to blog for the Web site. Is anyone doing things differently?