Comments on: Blogging and Blog Ads

By: metal builders

metal builders — Mon, 01 Nov 2004 20:14:53 +0000

i’m looking for http://steelbuildings.angelcities.com

By: steel buildings

steel buildings — Mon, 01 Nov 2004 15:50:12 +0000

i’m looking for http://steelbuildings.angelcities.com

By: jonathan briggs

jonathan briggs — Fri, 29 Oct 2004 15:13:33 +0000

I decided to run ads on one of my blogs. I don’t think it will make me rich. My blog however supports my teaching and I was interested in the contextual content that the ads provided. My students have found some interesting products and technologies because of the ads.

By: jonathan briggs

jonathan briggs — Fri, 29 Oct 2004 15:12:19 +0000

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Fri, 29 Oct 2004 05:06:11 +0000

If everyone is paying full price, Sully would be making about $4000/week, which is pretty impressive. I’d guess, though, that a lot of discounting goes on.

By: Gary Farber

Gary Farber — Fri, 29 Oct 2004 03:01:15 +0000

As an utterly trivial note, I’d not count Lileks’s site as without ads, because he does advertise and sell his own books. (And I can’t see anything possibly wrong with that, to be sure.) On my own humble site, which does not appear on the Technorati Top 100 Most Linked (though it does appear at #31 on the Blogstreet equivalent list), the Google ad contract strictly forbids sharing any monetary information, but I’ll mumble that while it’s under three figures per month, it’s not so tiny as to be invisible to my budget, either. Blogads I’m tending to make a huge ~$30/month, give or take. So, altogether, not remotely close to a liveable income, but more than enough to buy slightly higher quality gruel.

By: freddie

freddie — Fri, 29 Oct 2004 02:14:50 +0000

I am delighted to report that with a number of large grants from generous donors, I continue to maintain a free blog, without ads, and without popups, at Http://www.GoodShit.phlap.net the site is for the discriminating and sophisticated and thus I do not garner a huge amount of hits daily but I do get a decent amount and many many return hits throughout the day.

By: Martin Wisse

Martin Wisse — Thu, 28 Oct 2004 09:17:40 +0000

On a more serious note, I personally haven’t sought ads for my own sites (Progressive Gold or Wis[s]e Words because a) I don’t need them to pay for my blog upkeep, having just a fraction of the visitors of say Atrios and my monthly costs are $7.99 for a website I would have anyway. and b) I don’t like to get money for something I do as a hobby. I do not fault those who do choose to have ads to keep the cost down or even because they’d like to make some money off their venture, but I do dislike those who, like Sullivan are asking for greatly inflated sums of money directly fromt heir readers, or those who just seem to blog in order to attract ads…

By: Martin Wisse

Martin Wisse — Thu, 28 Oct 2004 08:53:11 +0000

A Fistful of Euros has ads?

By: eschaton

eschaton — Thu, 28 Oct 2004 08:28:03 +0000

Sully’s advertising rates: 1 week ($400) 2 weeks ($725) 1 month ($1300) http://www.blogads.com/boetvmbpmdpn/andrewsullivanblogads/advertise

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Thu, 28 Oct 2004 06:22:44 +0000

We need to get cracking on our line of mugs and T-shirts!

By: Jackmormon

Jackmormon — Thu, 28 Oct 2004 05:23:22 +0000

Warning—long ruminative post. Billmon decided not to use ads. I think that facing the financial costs of his hobby while watching kos get public flak for his Fallujah comments might have precipitated the demise of his blog. If I weren’t still so unhappy about the demise of the Whiskey Bar, I’d say that it was another instance of the self-destructive puritanical streak of the left. From a more objective position, I can say that ads make what was a private or underground communication much more public. The recently unmasked Atrios, for example, has become a public figure, largely because of his ability to raise dollars. In my opinion, Billmon was the better writer, but Atrios was willing to assume a public identity. I guess what I’m worried about is that highly frequented underground blogs like Billmon’s will tend to fold under the pressure of the public commerical forum. Yet I do recognize that such is the fate of most personalized, contrarian literature in any medium or century. What was private, and became popular, has a way of becoming public, although the costs never exactly do.

By: ArC

ArC — Wed, 27 Oct 2004 22:48:17 +0000

Chiming in to say that I too thought Joel On Software was in large part an ad for his company. Hell, he cites it as part of their marketing strategy.

By: anon

anon — Wed, 27 Oct 2004 22:08:24 +0000

How the hell is Joel on Software noncommercial? He’s got big text adverts for his software at the bottom of every page! Scoble is paid by Microsoft to publicize their technology. He claims the page isn’t approved by Microsoft and is personal, but I don’t believe it for a second, because Microsoft is known for astroturf.

By: Anthony

Anthony — Wed, 27 Oct 2004 18:23:31 +0000

I don’t believe that anyone really thinks political blogs are “inherently unbiased” – part of the beauty of political blogs is that they are biased. That being said, I think they’re less susceptible to being biased by their advertisers, as people read political blogs partly for the biased view they provide. I haven’t looked into ads for my blog, but I understand that the common way to place ads is for a blog to sign up with an ad aggregator, and for advertisers to choose which blogs to advertise on. So advertisers on blogs are more likely to be like the NRA in terms of effects. The NRA’s money doesn’t make a congressman pro-gun, it comes because the congressman is pro-gun. Similarly with advertisers who care about the politics of the blogs. An outfit like George Soros’ Quantum Fund wouldn’t advertise on CT to try to sway CT; rather, the Quantum fund would advertise on CT because CT and George Soros have similar political beliefs.