Bob Patterson: State-Paid Slut?

At least prostitutes get paid...

The title of this post comes from something a fellow correctional officer used to say: “Bob, we are nothing but state-paid sluts.” The recent comment that Chris from Martial Development made, got me to thinking about something that’s been nagging me: how many of us bloggers are making money for someone else? Probably a lot.

I’ve been blogging since about 2004 and tracking my activities well since 2005. Initially I blogged about the intersection of faith and doubt — along with a healthy dose of information literacy and politics. Occasionally I still do blog about those topics. Once I had my martial arts reawakening I made the decision to focus this blog on all-things martial arts.

During the reawakening I self-hosted with Dreamhost for a few years. The good part was total freedom and the ability to host paid ads. The downside is that I was spending way too much time worrying about site maintenance, upgrades, etc. and not enough time blogging. I also did not come close to the readership I now have. Since I was using WordPress themes I just moved my blogg to WordPress.com. Overall I still like their free blog offerings as opposed to Google’s Blogger. IMO the WordPress templates look better and do give you many customization options that Blogger does not.

Who’s Making Money?

• Hosted sites like Blogger and WordPress.com make money from ad revenue – so, if your blog is on one of those sites you are contributing to someone’s profit.
• Sites like Blogcritics Magazine, OnToplist, etc. also make money off your blog traffic. Again – it’s about generating ad revenue.

This is why, for example, even if I pay WordPress.com for extra customization features it’s still against their TOS to run ads and make money:

Adsense, Yahoo, Chitika, TextLinkAds and other ads are not permitted on WordPress.com blogs*. If you would like to run ads on your blog, please look into running your own copy of WordPress with one of our hosting partners.

Now WordPress.com does let you in on the profit but you really have to work for it!

We are testing a feature called Ad Control that lets WordPress.com bloggers with a lot of traffic (generally 50,000 pageviews/month or more) and appropriate content turn on AdSense for their blog and split the resulting revenues 50/50 with us.

It took me years to build up traffic to 14,000 – 15,000 page views per month. So achieving 50,000 is not realistic. I may, however, e-mail them and grumble.

The price of free:

The fact of the matter is that many bloggers do not have the time, skills, or desire to self-host. So, in my opinion, that’s the fair trade: some enterprising people created these services to make money and also provide a service. In some ways this is comparable to scholarly publishing. In my alter ego I have written many reviews for professional publications, numerous articles for scholarly and professional magazines,  and have presented at conferences. I’ve done all of that for FREE. The reality of most scholarly activities is that publishers make money off of scholar’s free work. Now, if you build up a reputation, you might get lucky and become an “invited” presenter, consultant, or author. When that happens some money can be made, however, it’s not a lot. Same goes for scholarly book publishing: it’s the rare scholar that can make a killing — you’re lucky if you break even and maybe make a few extra bucks.

Why Contribute to Someone’s Profit?

• If you don’t like the model self-host and charge for ad space. Then you can take advantage of hit generating services like Toplist or Blogcritics.
• Here are a few of the bloggers that self-host: Formosa Fitness, Wim Demeere, Real Taijiquan, and Martial Development. Most are in the business of martial arts but also host a blog on their commercial site. You’ll have to contact them to see if they make any money from these activities.
• Maybe your blog is not ready for self-hosting. Early on I realized that I was a fool to pay for something that was self-hosted when there’s all these great free blogging platforms. So, perhaps, hold off self-hosting until you build up an audience and reputation.
• I can say with almost certainty that WordPress.com, Toplist, and Blogcritics have increased my readership exponentially. So consider those services early on to build up readership. If you start to hit high numbers consider self-hosting and charge for ad space.  (Hint: All hosted blogs let you migrate your blog posts archive to a self-hosted platform.)

I’m a willing contributor to Toplist and Blogcritics. Yes, they make money off my work. However they have increased my readership so I consider us even. Moreover, Toplist has let me beta test new services and in return, gave Striking Thoughts free ad space on their main page. It’s a fair deal in my opinion.

It’s also about writing. Much like the martial arts, you only get better if you keep practicing. My recent involvement with Blogcritics is an example here. As far as I know, I’m their first martial arts blogger or one of the very few. So writing for them has forced me to write for a mostly non-martial arts audience which has broadened my writing horizons.

In addition, I’ve willing reviewed materials for various martial arts authors. Again: this is a fair trade in my opinion. I had no stipulations on what kind of review I had to write. They provided me free material — much of which contributed to my own martial arts knowledge. I, in turn reviewed their products and practiced writing about something I enjoy. If their product was good I hope I helped to promote it in some small way. No complaints there whatsoever!

Lastly, there is this:

“Real men cherish the truth. To work for favor, or offer one’s skills for profit, is the behavior of small men and mediocre warriors.”
- Choi, Hong Hi, founder of Tae Kwon Do

A version of this philosophy is why academic publishers are willing to take advantage of scholars who essentially work for free. However, even in academia, there is a counter-movement called open access, which is attempting to take some of that power away from the publishers.

The aim of the Directory of Open Access Journals is to increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific and scholarly journals thereby promoting their increased usage and impact.

We define open access journals as journals that use a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access.

My philosophy has it’s limits. This past year I’ve had to turn down six offers from e-business that wanted to pay me for ad space on my blog. Right now I am seriously considering self-hosting again. However, I doubt I will until I resolve Operation Job Hunt 2010. Assuming I find and land that “next big job”, once I’m settled I will considering self-hosting. Then again, perhaps, not.

Until then I’m a mostly free prostitute.

Note to publishers: Want to pay me to write? Shoot me an e-mail at bpatterson67@comcast.net. We’ll talk!

-BCP

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