A Quick Buck

Greetings,

While not related to FM this is a thought which has been going through my head for some time and I decided that it was time to put it to "print". There are various considerations we need to make before we decide to make a quick dollar or two out of a hobby or something we do, and this post will go through some of the thought processes that I have recently been through.

I have three different blogs. I have this one, one about fencing and one which studies Elizabethan English and associated subjects. The fencing blog is by far the most popular of the two, indeed it hit 75,000 hits not to long ago. Even if you added the hits together of the other two you would not get close to that. This is discussing that blog, which I write to inform people about my thoughts with regard to various bits and pieces mostly about the use of the rapier, but other things as well.

I had previously looked at blogger's AdSense previously to see what the deal was, just in passing without any consideration of using it at all. In essence, you select adds, they go on your blog, when people hit those adds, you get money out of it, a simple process. Seemed like a simple idea and possibly a way to supplement my pension. As my fencing blog became more and more popular the consideration for using AdSense grew as I thought it would be nice to have a little extra cash on the side.

I established a date when I would put AdSense into the blog, and waited and thought about it. The date arrived and I decided not to do it. What? Why not? I have seen things commercialised all over the place. Advertisements being added to Youtube, free-to-air TV these days feeling like there are more advertisments than program, pay TV even having advertisments. I decided that I was not going to follow this trend. While my readers were in no way obligated to click on any of the advertisments, their mere presence would seem like I had caved into pressure.

If there are going to be these advertisements on my blog, they are going to be there because I put them there, because I want to sell the product. They will be products which I personally endorse and/or have used myself, or they are ones I have produced in some way myself. Commercialisation invades our lives all over the place, and it seems that if you are not making people pay for it, it is not worth having or reading. I disagree with this whole-heartedly. There is information and services which should be free, or as close to it as possible. We should not have to be bombarded by advertisements all of the time.

Cheers,

Henry.