In my various (albeit admittedly limited) internet wanderings among the science blogosphere I see a cross-section of writers with a variety of approaches and audience sizes. There are large sites like ours or Nature or LiveScience or Scienceblogs and then smaller ones like Cosmicvariance or Realclimate right down to successful independent ones like badastronomy.

But most people write for a pretty limited audience.

Everyone here probably started writing for a limited audience also. So what motivated you to start and keep at it? Was it to correspond for friends, more technical in nature or were you interesting in writing science for the public?

If you didn’t have an audience of hundreds of thousands per month and up, would you still do it?