Big News
August 25th, 2004 - 3:37 pm
Google, which owns Blogger, is going to pay people to blog:
Google plans to revert to contextual ads powered by its AdSense program, which was launched last June, with a major twist.
“We are going to start paying bloggers. Soon you will be blogging for dollars. That’s right people, chocolate is to peanut butter like AdSense is to blogs. Or is it the other way around? Either way, we’ve got something big here folks,” the company said in a note posted online.
It’s usually a sign that a blogger has “made it,” when they get off of Blogger and get their own domain. Are we about to see the movement reverse direction?
Take me back ‘Blogger’…
….I’ll change. I swear. All that time I spent with those mu.nu whores, I was thinking about you. I love you baby. Take me back!!…
Whew. I’m glad I never deleted my blogspot account.
I’ve been running Google Ads for a month or so now and haven’t seen a penny. Don’t know what to expect or when… Meanwhile, I’ve been running BlogAds and done quite nicely from them… er, relatively…
Damn, if only I could write well.
They can keep their money and I’ll keep my domain. As much as I’d love to see blogging as a source of income (or, at least, self-sustaining), I’m happy having more control of my site and my offerings than I would ever have with one of the hosted services.
Roger, I’m not sure where the problem is with your AdSense ads. I’ve been running AdSense on my website since the beginning of last October and have realized between $2,000 and $3,000 in revenues, at an average of over $200 a month. Maybe AdSense is not seeing the keywords on your blog that you want it to see?
I definitely wanna go back to Blogspot and wrestle with the living HELL of Hello from Picasa. One of the classy things about VPundit is NO ADS.
I don’t know. In the first place, I’m just naturally chea…uh…thrifty. Free hosting is definitely for me. If I can get paid, so much the better.
ANd I’ve never had any problem with Hello. I use it every day for my Pic O’ the Day.
In my first blog incarnation I had ads. It was an experiment of sorts which I committed to for one year. The requirements for earning revenue were:
a click through and a visit for more than 30 seconds.
I had a lot of traffic to my site as it was part of my course requirement that students visit it once a week to catch up on assignments and class discussions.
By the end of the year, my experiment netted me a whopping profit of $27.35. All in all, not worth the unsightly hogging of my precious webpage real estate.
Great.
Just great. [NOTE: THIS LINK FELL OFF THE BACK OF A SANDCRAWLER...]…
Roger has ads?
My eyes have apparently been trained to filter out any and all kinds of banner advertising …
Interestingly enough, you don’t have to have a blogspot blog to participate.
I’ll have to agree with the Zombyboy…it’s much better to control your own ….that’s one of the nice things about having a blog…
Can’t say that the 50 cents a day from Adsense makes much difference to my decision to blog or not (it’s all to do with my planet sized ego you see). I did note one interesting little thing about the Blogger announcement: Blogger takes a cut of the dough. So Google gets a cut via the regular Adsense program, then Blogger gets another cut. Hhhhmm. What was the Google stock price?
I’ll stick with BlogAds too. They aren’t making me rich, but they pay for hosting. I like having hobbies that are self-financing.
I blog on blog spot, i would just like to point out a few changes that they have made.
The put a nav bar in place of the ads that were once there. These nav bars at the top of the page have a “next blog” button in the top right that allow you to randomly go through blogs (that alone increased tracific at my site).
Then blogger released the adsense thing.
What they did was create a self contained community, then created an ad base around that self contained community.
I was stunned by the beauty of that…then the next question that i asked…was this leagal.
BIG NEWS For Bloggers (At Blogspot): Your Efforts Could Get You $$$
If you’re on Blogspot you may soon be PAID to blog. Stephen Green has the details — and asks the tantilizing question.
I’m devolving, I guess. I just closed my blog and opened a new one on blogspot. If I keep it up, I’ll be drawing on cave walls by next year.
As RTO trainer suggests, one needn’t have a blogspot hosted blog in order to make use of the AdSense services.
I use blogger as my publishing platform, but I host everything from my own server and while I do not have the complete control that another platform might offer, I am for the time, somewhat below what I suspect to be my peter principle with my current abilities to code, so blogger suits me fine.
Google has closed the loop, and who can blame them. They’ve now the unenviable position of having to keep shareholders maniacally happy to keep that share price high. This will result in an influx of revenue in the short term for Google.
They may fail to realize the cabalistic nature of the blogosphere however, as bloggers furtively seek to fuel other bloggers with needless, uninspired clicks.
If i joined an underground alliance of one hundred bloggers and agreed to click on one add per day per blogger, and each of my fellow bloggers did the same, we would generate significant revenue for one another, likely tens of dollars a day.
Will click-cabals kill the adsense/blogger program?
Time will tell.
The Anchoress is suspicious of blogger even as she resides there. She happened into it by accident and had a blog before she knew what was happening. Now, she’s not even comfy yet with writing out links (although she’s managed to successfully link to Vodkapundit)and they want her to connect to ad thingies. I think I will wait to sign on to that stuff and learn first how to provide a link, post a picture and so on. That said…for technophobes like me, blogger provides some blogging-training wheels, rather in the way AOL provided net-training wheels for the clumsiest of us ten years ago. http://www.theanchoress.blogspot.com
RS – Ditto on that. But being off Blof*Spot has been so heavenly!
I was on BlogSpot for a year, and now I hate going back there for anyone else’s blogs, because:
-the page often takes an unreasonable period of time to load, and
-the permalinks still don’t seem to work half the time.
verrry… interesting
If I could sit here on my Cracker ass, blog and get paid for it, I might seriously consider that…
You know you’ve made it when you have a mu.nu address.
You’ve got that right.
Hmm, must have done something wrong. Went out, researched, and bought some hosting. I was supposed to start on Blogger? Does that mean I arrived too early? Damn! I hate getting there before the drinks are mixed …
I’m surprised they haven’t done anything to go after blogger users like myself who supply their own hosting. They probably figure that most of those people already have google ads – which I do. I’ve made a grand total of about $4.
You should’ve done what I did: parodied a Sullivan blegathon. I made $8.
Well, after seeing a gigantic Vodka-spike this past May when Stephen linked to me in the same paragraph as Reynolds and Lileks, I nonetheless let the ol’ Blogspot lapse into inactivity. (I’m now fighting the good Anglican fight).
Google/Blogger will almost certainly see some scratch with this new arrangement, but look at how it will really work: Thousands and thousands of small-time bloggers, who have marginal readership precisely because they’re marginally talented, will now put their shoulders to the wheel and turn out more and more marginal content in the hopes that they can buy that yacht from ad revenues. They even may get that $27.83 a year, but it will be a fraction what Blogger makes off the backs of these poor scribes. Most will tire of the whole thing, and once the revenue models get worked out for talented bloggers with real traffic, blog readers will coalesce around the core of heavyweights who have new opportunities for revenue, which create new opportunities for exposure, which creates more revenue, and so on. Those who still wish to post at Blogger because they love to write will continue to do so, and they will be called “people who love to write and happen to get paid a little for it.” But those who slave away every day in order to post yet another tepid 500-word entry to keep that SiteMeter above 200 visits a day, confident in the knowledge that one day those BLogAds revenues are really going to skyrocket, will be called, simply, “suckers.”
BlogSpot bloggers will then be scorned even more than they are now. They’ll go from being simply people who will settle for a lousy service, to being people who will settle for a lousy service AND be the lowest-paid member on the Blogger food chain. They will be the Amway salesmen of bloggers, and in a way, I guess some sense of normalcy will have returned to the blogosphere.
Blogger: “Once we were the AOL of the blogosphere. Now we’re even more so.”
Ducky.
The thing I find most unnerving about this google ad thing is the content requirements. Among other things, there is to be no excessive profanity or hate speech. They’re a business and they’re free to set the terms of the contracts they make, but methinks the point of the political weblogs, at least, is relatively unfettered speech. I wonder whether some of the sharper, but sometimes controversial, blogs like Little Green Footballs could stay in such a program. And how pleased one could really be to be in such a program if something like LGF was in a different category.
I won’t have anything to do with an ad server that doesn’t allow me to decide which items to allow and which to block. I won’t have my site be a party to promoting things I detest.