Vanity Publishing

I found an interesting comment by John at Nonsense Nation, which touches on a topic dear to a few bloggers hearts.

My Adsense income is pretty dismal. It helps with the cost of running a site but it is weak.

Someone (not me; I don’t have the time) has to set up something a la Link Exchange for bloggers. They could sell extra impressions on your site for you and cut you a check for part of it.

Advert Wizard used to do this. In the end they were selling adverts for a few cents per thousand impressions. Add in that your cut would be a few per cent of that and you see the problem. I think banner exchanges are a hard market to sell advertising on, especially on blogs which might be themed, but could still have off-the-wall entries for a few days, or unmoderated comments mocking the advertisers – which reminds me of something for next week. AdSense, those Google ads you see on many sites, is in many ways quite brave. Some blogs can be expensive to run and income from adverts tends to be pitifully low for the average site, so I can see the attraction of advertising schemes. If Geocities can make money from terrible web pages, then why can’t I make my millions from my own terrible web pages? The answer is that while much of Geocities is dross, they serve viewers on an unimaginably larger scale than I do. The low barriers to publication might make it look like I’m on a level playing field with Salon, but the simple fact is that most blogs, like this one, are vanity publishing. Cheap vanity publishing, but vanity publishing nonetheless. AdSense works in much the same way that vanity publishing works, we’re told the readership will be low, but everyone hopes that they will be the one to make the big break.

So while the extra money would be handy, I’ve budgeted the hosting so that I can afford the site and removed any Google adverts from the pages. I may still add them on a post-by-post basis if I think a post is likely to cause me a bandwidth problem, but generally I’d rather not have adverts for antiquities of dubious legality on the site.

The paid links that you will find on site are the Amazon associate links and soon Abebooks. The Amazon links are there because I’d probably link through to them anyway. It’s handy to be able to read other reviews of a book regardless of whether or not you’re going to buy it. And if I am linking anyway then I may as well earn money from it. So far it’s the grand sum of £1:50. The other site I’ll be linking to soon is Abebooks. With their affiliate scheme it’s possible to link through to individual books. Their listings tend to be second hand or remaindered books, which makes them cheaper than Amazon. Those links will appear once I’ve made a small dollar icon, just to be open about which are the associate links and which aren’t.

Of course if I really wanted to make the big money, I’d make a site on something people want to read about. What do people want to read about? As the screen grab below shows, the new version of Windows, BMX bikes and ramblings about French theory. I should point out I don’t see my thoughts on Latour as the final word. It’s entirely feasible that I’m simply making explicit my misunderstandings of his work. Nevertheless the people have spoken, next week it’s “Will Windows enable a team of theorists on BMX bikes to win the Tour de France?”

Actually, I am thinking of writing a gratutious Britney Spears post. I’m told anything with Britney Spears in the title will attract a massive number of hits. I find that hard to believe, so I’m going to have to test it. My favourite Britney site is Britney’s Guide to Semiconductor Physics. —–