Friday, March 4, 2011

Selling Out, If Anyone's Buying

This is the 100th post on this blog, and if you've been poking around here from the beginning, you may have noticed a few annoying ads popping up from time to time. Moreover, you may have noticed some ads that are diametrically opposed to the points of view I've been promulgating. Yeah, I noticed that, too.

This is just part of the Blogger.com gestalt. I clicked on a few links and agreed to "monetize" my blog, and so the ads show up at random. They're supposed to have something to do with whatever this blog's about, but it's not an exact science. I see some of the same ads on some of my favorite progressive blogs, and I mostly just ignore them. But if enough people click on the ad, eventually Google will send me a check for fifteen cents or something.

I can also select specific ads that link up to Amazon, whether for my own books, relevant books or CDs, or for search categories. If the ad happens to be for something you were about to buy anyway, clicking on it and purchasing the item could generate slightly larger micropayments for me.

I plan to keep blogging along as I can, though if I ever return to full-time work, the time I have to post random scrapings off the back of my brain will be constrained. Eventually I'll add some sort of link to pass the hat for donations. But I don't expect to make a living from this. The bloggers who do either got into the game fairly early and are established brands (Kos, Marshall), or have built up audiences large enough for the micropayments to add up (Digby, Booman), or have been hired into some sort of institutional support (Atrios, Yglesias).

So far I can keep up the fevered pace of about a post and half a day by tossing out a lot of re-runs. Sometime soon I'll be running out of those, so I'll either be offering semi-fresh commentary like the post below, or posting excerpts from future writing projects in order to help promote them.

Anyway, that's the state of the blog to date. It's been fun so far, and it keeps me out of the pool halls.

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