SEEN & HEARD ON A RECENT BLOG read by hundreds of OS readers:
Advertising inserted into blogs? What if we don't endorse said product[s]? WTF? ARE YOU SERIOUS?
My honest response, and apparently my mistake:
Sorry, friends. As a long-time journalist who's always had to share my word space with advertisers, this just doesn't bother me in the least. If OS fails to vet objectionable ads, then I have a problem. Define objectionable, you say? Anything overly political masked as editorial, anything even mildly racist or sexist, anything illegal. Outside that, friends, welcome to the world of writing - going back more than 100 years.
This did not sit well with some:
~ And for the journalist who said "Welcome to the world of writing", thing is: you were getting paid for your pieces (I'm guessing.) This isn't your average writer/advertiser dynamic here. This is different. We're not making any money for our writing. Others will be but we won't. There's some choice involved in the old paradigm.
~ I'm particularly thrown by Lisa Romero's comment. As a "long-time journalist" I can understand that she is accustomed to sharing space with advertising. Me, too. But working journalists GET PAID for the words that are sitting there next to those revenue-generating ads.
My response:
Look, friends - here's my view....
If you are writing here, then you ARE a journalist. Period. Public writing + public reading = journalism. Pure and simple.
Please accept my commentary as a genuine compliment - one that recognizes your extraordinary talents and my long-time connection to many of you, and that acknowledges NONE of us is getting rich here - but neither should we ignore the fact that, for journalistic history as far as anyone can remember, when you publish you accept the terms of the publisher.
Understandably, many of you are unhappy. You are artists. It is the nature of artists to rail against the machine. I admire that. I do.
Just please remember - this too shall pass. Ads on your blog simply means more people are reading - that there's a viable market for your writing.
Ignore it as you can.
Practice your craft.
Share your views - and thank a forum like OS for giving us the ability to do so in an affordable, high-profile way that gives us as much exposure as damn near any other public blogging site I've ever run across.
Apologies if my frank opinion offended. I only meant to say it's going to be OK. You're experiencing what every journalist has felt.
That's how I know each of you is a journalist in your own right.
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David Sirota
Patrick McEvoy-Halston
Kathy Riordan
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Comments
Whatever.
I'm feeling particularly bitchy about this whole thing. Sorry.
I still feel fine.
This is not an artist commune. Hell, half the time I feel bad for the paid journalists on Salon.com who have to compete with our egotistical ramblings.... I confess, I barely look there anymore. (Note to Kerry and Joan - can we put a Salon.com button higher on the page than the bottom of the page to remind us of our roots?)
Advertise away!! I'm still writing what I like... it hasn't changed anything, really.
Seriously, I welcome any revenue generated by these annoying ads. I'll continue to hang out and write here. It's understandable that some are offended and want to leave. To me, it doesn't change the dynamic we have here.
OK - well, my point is you're probably glancing and ignoring, glancing and ignoring, glancing and OH! ... Hey, that ad's interesting, let's move on, read read. Then back to glancing and ignoring.
And so it is with this venue. There's nothing dreadful or ridiculous or heinous or criminal about it.
If you're a writer (and you all know you are), then all I'm saying is welcome to my world. I feel no cheaper for the tangential alliance with advertising publishers have made against my will all these years.
I just discovered it yesterday, and don't know how to use it yet, but if it works, we shouldn't have a problem.
I'm not especially concerned about blinking ads junking up my pristine pages, but I do feel alarmed by what OS is poised to become.
There's no editorial oversight here. There aren't enough editors to read all the posts. When people squabbled over why certain bloggers are shoo-ins for EP's each and every time, while clearly worthier posts go undistinguished, the best explanation I ever heard was, "Simple--the editors didn't read your posts. End of story." Given that reality, I can't count on anyone being around to get rid of the crappy so-called blogging that's bound to show up just as soon as the e-merchants get wind of the opportunities now available to all at Open Salon.
I know I've already blogged about this, but it bears repeating. I know of only one Internet commerce guru, and there must be loads more. This one, Ed Dale, sells most of his seminars and e-tutorials, but once yearly he offers what he calls The 30-Day Challenge, where he teaches people how to maximize traffic to their websites. This year, 50,000 wannabe Internet entrepreneurs signed up for it, and it's just now starting. Hell, some of you gung-ho ones should go check him out so you can throw yourselves into this heart and soul.
I don't know all his methods, but Google is one of them. He teaches them how to hone search terms and discover how many people have used the search term on a daily basis, and how many Google hits they got in return. If the # times searched/#hits returned on Google ratio is high, that term is a good keyword. Effective headlines are next. How do you draw in the most suckers, er, readers? Only then do you think about actual content. Ed Dale actively looks for tips to pass on to his classes. One year recently it was to go open a Facebook account, because they were going to start doing ad clicks, and they were opening up the website to more members. So thousands of people hurried over to Facebook. Facebook, in response, had to change their ad program so it would not be so attractive to a bunch of outsiders. (I don't remember now how that got resolved.) The point I'm making is that these people are eager to leech themselves and their content-lite articles to any site that will give them some space to post, because they're truly looking to get so many ad clicks a day that the 2/100ths of a cent per click will add up to something significant.
Their modus operandi is to open as many free blogs as they can, ideally a couple dozen, post the same or very nearly the same content at them all, link them all together, with the goal of getting to the top of Google for their chosen search term. If they don't write well, that's okay; a paraphrase from another source, often not attributed, is fine. They'll put the same or nearly the same post up at ezinearticles.com for even more preferential Google treatment. It doesn't matter if they don't choose the ads; they want clicks, and the more page loads they've got going at multiple sites, the more ad revenue they're going to make.
Ever wonder why the Internet expanded from millions of websites to billions of websites? Are there honestly 1000 times more unduplicated webpages online now than there were eight or nine years ago? Of course not. The Internet is bulging, splitting at the seams, with repetitious information of dubious value, placed only for "monetization."
My fear is that OS will succeed in this business model they are courting. How they will avoid being the next free site for all the hopeful ad-click millionaires, I don't know. They spent a year building a reputation for being a quality writing site. The credibility that has brought OS will make it that much more tempting a site to mine for ad revenues by the crass e-commerce brigade.
Oh, the humanity!!
I do hope I'm wrong, all wrong. pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease But I'm not hopeful.
For nine months now, I've had a friendly, active and loyal forum here at OS. I get to read tons of great writing without paying a cent for it. I have an audience. I'd like this forum to survive. I think the steps OS has taken have been taken in good faith, and if I can help them, and me, out by hosting a few ads, I'm willing to do so.
(Not that I expect to actually make any money. I mostly enabled the ads because I figured it would do OS some good.)
I understand that some readers absolutely don't want to see this stuff, but I think that in the overall, we have to understand that the "free for everybody all the time" model of the internet is inevitably going to evolve into something that involves somebody, somewhere, making money, or at least breaking even. And if this translates into a tiny bit of revenue for us, the writers (who have been doing this all along for free anyway; what does this change?), it's ok by me.
I trust Open Salon. That's what it comes down to. I trust them to make decisions that are to all of our benefit. I think the assumption that someone is trying to take us for a ride here, or profit from our slave labour (as opposed to engaging us in a mutually beneficial relationship) is incredibly cynical. I wouldn't place this trust in everyone - I'm not naturally trusting at the best of times - but I'm going to take a leap here.
And if anyone would like to continue to follow my blog ad-free, I'm still keeping it at WordPress and no one is paying or earning a cent.
http://siobhancurious.wordpress.com/
I'm going to cross-post this comment, but I wanted to leave it here as well, to support your position on all this. Thanks for your clear-headed view.
Maybe I'm overly sensitive about having all these sexual abuse ads on my blog, when I've never written anything remotely related to sexual abuse, no one else seems to be afflicted by the same problem, and I can't figure out how to turn it all off. It's making me unhappy.
On the plus side, I've earned 53 cents already today.
After all, THAT'S human nature. :-D
Oh, I thumbed this. Thought you oughtta know.
I was getting actual checks on Blogger until I started writing here within a fun community of smart people under the umbrella of a smart organization. Glad to have ads again so I can get the best of both worlds.
Write on, calm heads. :)
Imagine: We are constructively ARGUING for or against the new paradigm for publishing. Friends, we stand on the cusp of communications history. There will be a time, when we are old and grey, when we'll look back and think how antiquated or quaint this technology was (think: AOL chat rooms in the '90s, which were an explosive phenomenon in their day).
How we communicate with each other about our thoughts, hopes, dreams is a relatively new conversation if you think about it.... Twenty years ago, the public had few alternatives - and largely left the communicating to professionals, or shared their views in written letters.
That we're arguing at ALL demonstrates the tectonic shift in modern communications - far, far beyond the "medium is the message."
At the paper, the ads belong to the paper. On my blog (with my name on it) that I have links to throughout the web, I'm the one associated with the ads.
oh yeah, and nobody's making any real money from this internet advertising thing anyway... it's like grasping at strands