Money Matt

  1. Start a weblog.
  2. Add Google AdSense ads.
  3. Make money.
Matt explains why targeting is crucial for this to work. That's why this site made $28 in the last three months, and PVRblogs makes enough to buy an aeron chair each month. It bothers me to think that advertising is going to be the way to pay people for their work on the web. I thought we could do better than television.

Traditional book publishers should also read this article. It could be more lucrative for an author to keep a weblog on a subject than write a book on a subject.
posted Oct 5th, 2003 at 9:09 am

Comments

A very good point, pb, but I think Matt left unstated something essential to deciding if this tip is valuable for you: if your topic is unrelated to acquiring things, it seems unlikely that AdSense will be useful to you.

I still say there needs to be another compensation model for things like very personal writing, a site about reducing your involvement in consumer culture, or artistic expression such as Patrick's e-sheep comics site or Heather and Dean's daily photo sites. (Or those things will tend to remain uncompensated).

We might also want to make a distinction between push advertising like an AdSense text ad or a banner and pull advertising like "here's the book jacket of what I'm reading, and if you click on it you can read more about it at Amazon and buy it if you feel like it or not".
by Dinah on October 8th, 2003 at 12:56 pm
Excellent points Dinah, and I agree direct consumer to producer compensation would be ideal. I don't think the arguments about micropayments vs. advertising are going to be solved anytime soon. I'm sure there are successes you can point to in both camps.

That's an interesting distinction between push and pull advertising, but I'm not sure it makes a difference to people reading the page. I guess if a site owner is able to specificly choose which exact products they're advertising (a la Amazon/what I'm reading) they may have more meaning.
by pb on October 8th, 2003 at 1:50 pm