I Want to Sell-Out!

wordpress.com doesn't allow you to add javascript-- hence no Adsense/YPN/adCenter. A lot of bloggers have banners and ads on their sites. In fact, the guys who run this site are building their own ad system.

Thank you very much! I just signed up for the thing yesterday and DLed the program and haven't had much chance to play around with it, but I couldn't help but notice the total lack of AdSense and so on on all the sites I surfed.

So, am I completely off as to the unspoken code of hippy "honor"? I mean, is the overall opinion that, were they allowed, most people would use AdSense-like advertising?

I think it depends on the circle. I am sure you will find a lot of people that say advertising is the death of blogging. (Commercials are the death of TV too!) But I doubt you will see much of that BS around the performancing camp.

Personally, I think they aren't allowed for a few reasons:
1) Wordpress company should get the revenue since it is their site and they are hosting you
2) Think of the spam. Free blogs where you could put adsense-- the system would collapse under the weight of spammers autogenerating 1000s of sites. I can think of a few people who would love to take advantage of that.

Sites like WritingUp and BlogFeast seem to do okay, even though they definitely attract a lot of spam. Of course, they are hivesites, so they control the AdSense and so forth, and they don't allow JS, either.

But, so long as they allow for banner ads, there are plenty of options. I just wondered why I hadn't seen any AdSense, Yahoo!, or similar program boxes around the sites.

Thanks for the help, too!

I seem to recall that one of Carl Marx's dreams included the concept that some day people would equalize and advance together to the point where people would be paid/compensated/reimbursed/given-something-of-value for their knowledge or information.

It strikes me on about a weekly basis, that this ideal is becoming a reality on the web in the form of the blog. Commercials were not the death of TV but the birth of TV. Commercials similarly funded radio and the radio stock market runup in the twenties. Both mediums allowed a small group of people and companies to capitalize off of the exchange and transmission of information.

The internet flattened that concept out and allowed even more people and companies to transmit information and was funded - especially in the early days - by advertising.

Now, pushing informative content and ideas onto a website has become so easy that almost anyone that can type can do it, and advertising is there as well.

Now, regardless of the pros or cons about advertising it does enable the transmission of money from one group to another. From a company that wants their information associated with the message or image created by another person.

So if IMVU.com wants to pay Google to pay me to splice their message in with mine as I post something on my blog, then I'm getting compensated for the the thought coming out of my head and getting transmitted on the net for all to see.

The fine people that read or watch my blog, may not want to pay me read my prose or watch my silly videos, but they don't mind if an advertiser catches their attention 1 out of 100 times and that advertiser pays me for the opportunity.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the hippies, for which I used to count myself as one and still do, should embrace this concept. I'm not selling coffee that will burn my mother and force her to have a hysterectomy. I'm not forcing thousands of people to work in a sweat shop in china(that was my last company and I'm cooperating with the authorities as I'm not only a professional blogger but a professional whistleblower too!), I'm destroying the earth, polluting the air, or anything else destructive.

Do I get advertisements from some of these companies on occassion? Sure, I do. I get Apple ads popping up on my blog all the time and many other corporations.

But I get those ads popping up in conjunction with my review, analysis and commentary on how they might do better business, improve their products, or how their customers might find a better use for their mousetrap.

Someday I aspire to build a web empire and sell the damn thing out for millions.

At heart I'm a hippy capitalist and I have no problem living in a world full of parodox.

______
Great article manodogs. You are a very good writer. I just wish you would write something on occassion that encourage people to comment and respond a little more . . .

;)

Thanks so much for the compliment, and I will try to write something that engenders more comments, but I'm still learning about all this stuff, so I tend to watch what I say more here than in other places -- largely because I don't want to stick my foot in my mouth.

You hit the nail on the head and I agree with you 100%:

I can't see what's so hard to grasp about this concept: if Company A wants me to push their product, and that product isn't, say, human-skin sweaters, hand-sewn by Chinese babies, then that is a win-win deal for both the company and myself!

No, I may not use their product, but mentioning it doesn't necessarily mean I am "selling-out." It means that I have a commodity they want to use and they will compensate me for the fair use of that, and that's a great thing! "Selling-out" is exactly what you said: compromising my moral or intellectual integrity to promote something I know is wrong.

And the worst thing about this is that the people to whom "selling-out" seems to matter most wouldn't even realize I was doing it, so long as I dropped a hefty amount of F-bombs along the way...

human-skin sweaters, hand-sewn by Chinese babies, but its late and I'm laughing at the implausibility and part of me is thinking that if someone can figure out how to have it done and market it, then the blogs will really light up!

I was trying to be a little sarcastic, which I think came across, you seem to get quite a bit of comment traction so do keep up the good work. :)

Post the first time I read it and I'm about to drop another one that's closely related to this whole thread, but I wanted to point out two articles I recently posted on writingUp. And I believe I am obeying TOS, since these are directly related to the subject at-hand -- this really isn't an attempt to promote myself; the posts are related to this subject, specifically -- but if I'm wrong, any/all Admin has every right to delete this Comment and I won't squall:

Recently, at writingUp, certain privileges have been challenged because a member abused them. I don't feel that she should be banned -- far from it, in fact -- but her lack of contrition and outright gloating has ruffled more than a few feathers, so I managed to crank-out a couple of heartfelt posts concerning the matter. I'll get into hivesites and community in my post here in a moment, and I'd like to apologize to Nichole beforehand, but I revisited this post in order to, you know, maintain integrity and what-not.

- MD

Both articles were nteresting. I do my best to approach bloggin and the internet from the perspective that Each shall do what thou wilt in the classic libertarian sense of do no harm to others as opposed to the anarchistic do what ever the hell you feel like.

Its always a fine line and everyone gets upset at times whether their feelings are justified or no.

The nice thing about wiki's is that they can condense out the feelings and leave a tangible idea for posterity. I like this concept a great deal from the idealistic perspective of trying to get at an original thought.

However, the lessons of history are rarely learned in the form of purest wisdom. We often require some context or link to the past to interpret the smallest nuggets of wisdom and the down side to this is that any argument we ever enter into online may be brought up to expose us for what we are

human!

About selling out I just want to add that if you have commercial 'items' on your website then you will always attract some comment abusing persons throwing 'anti commercialization' attacks at you which have nothing to do with the subject.

OT: Do you also use the word troll in such cases? To me it feels like I have never written 'troll' in English when talking about such a person.

I don't know about all cases, but it's definitely trolling in some cases. The word, "troll," used to refer specifically to someone who was "trolling for a fight" -- anyone who was obviously flaming or just being contrary in order to stir something up and usually get some attention -- and it was a pejorative. Nowadays, it's something of a compliment, in that if you manage to "troll" someone into responding, that person is dumb because he/she fell for it. I find the new use of the word (as a sort of compliment) completely bass-ackward, so I've all but quit using the word altogether.

I think that some people who are anti-commercial really feel they have a point, and to some extent I agree that they do; they aren't always just looking for an argument, so it wouldn't be fair to say they're trolling.

But I can answer it this way: I mentioned to an AOL-user that I was going to use ads on my site to help pay for it and hopefully make me some money on top of it, and she said, "People don't like ads." And you could have knocked me over with a feather: this is coming from someone who pays twice as much as anyone else for her Internet access and it is literally covered in ads!

It hadn't even occurred to her until I pointed this out.

I think, like most things, some people just allow their ideals to overshadow their common sense sometimes. And I could have made the point that were I to develop a paysite, most people would not pay for it, so it's the trade-off users have to make: pay for the services or deal with the ads.

And I did write the other post the other day, or most of it, but didn't have all the right links, so I'll try to get it up today or tomorrow. The holiday threw me off this week.

Thanks for the "trolling for a fight" explanation. The troll word feels much more comfortable now (in the English section of my brain :)

I didn't understand the original question when I saw the post a day or two ago. Trolling is a common phrased used in fishing.

One way to look at is 'trolling for fish' ergo boating around maybe quietly with a 'trolling motor' drawing a line or even a net behind you to see how many fish you can pull in.

I stopped fishing years ago myself. I enjoyed the sport, but don't eat much fresh water fish and don't make it to the ocean so I didn't see the point.

Personally, I have no problem with earning money from advertising, adsense or other means. My content comes at a price. I'm not giving away my knowledge for free, advertising makes it easier for my customers to pay. I tend to avoid arguments on this as its almost like a religion to many people on the web, but I don't hide my own views. Transparency is one of my ideals.

That makes sense. I always associated it with the "trolling for a date" idiom, but that is also analogous to what you stated and probably where that saying came from as well.

I just wanted to mention that I noted in an earlier Comment that I was about to blog something specific to the goings-on at writingUp, as it applied to community sites and so forth, and I dropped two links that didn't quite fit into the blog, but writingUp has been going down for a few hours at a time at least once a day almost everyday this month, and it's really hard to find anything on there, so I haven't been able to finish the post and to post it without links to the sources would just come off as a sort of rant.

I guess I'm in because I'm actively trying to sell out, if you can see it that way. As you say, we all need to pay the bills right? Why not do it doing something you enjoy. Rather than selling out, it's living the dream. Count me in.