The Art Of The Sellout (or How To Make Money With Your Blog)

So I'm standing behind my bar talking to this literate, kinda hot, white chick and I mention that I have restarted this blog. One of the first questions she asked was, "Do you sell ads?"

This, my friends, is the age of the sellout. Missy Elliot in Gap commercials, Companies buying ad space in songs, people selling space on their foreheads. We have sold our souls to corporate and wanna be corporate America in droves.

Great...I think.

Many in the blog world are jumping on the sellout train. Trying to get a few dollars before Microsoft owns the whole thing. Google ads, blogads, banners, Gawker, Drudge. The list of ways and people trying to make a dollar is endless.

Now in order to have ads you need to have an audience and so a small industry to drive traffic to sites has emerged. And even blogs dedicated to that has emerged (with ads from the companies which sell the products.)

I find the ads exhausting. The ads on Baldilocks fuck up my Mozilla browser when the page loads. I must really like her new picture to put up with that crap. Micheal King has a picture of himself wearing a suit and vest. To avoid 80's flashbacks you have to move your eyes to the ads and store  on the other side of the page.

You expect ads when you go to sites run by cheap labor republicans but even cool folks like Ray Garrard and Tyler & Alex keep a "tip jar" on their site asking for donations. Bol at ByronCrawford is in New York right now working on a deal so he can blog full time (no homo). If people are making deals with folks like Bol the bubble is upon us.

Now this site is pretty popular to me. Considering how sporadic I am writing it I'm lucky anyone reads it. But I have a core of loyal readers who don't post much but read everything.  I don't know what the attraction is but I have been blogging off and on, with the same topic and site name for years. I'm sure a lot of it  is just being around a long time.

Now I have ideas to make my site super popular and loved by the search engines and drive a shitload of traffic. But who has the time to find 10 links a day, optimize your titles and mention the word sex in every other post. The cost of me selling out is just too high.

Plus I'll have to buy a real domain name...

Now that doesn't mean that you'll never see an ad on this site. The owner of www.americanblack.info is just  as big of a sellout as the rest of you.  I'm just looking for a vest and some room on my forehead.

Comments

[karsh]

I'd go the sellout route, but I actually like writing for free. But the donation doors are always open!

[Prince C]

We're all sellouts these days...