….To quote REG from “Withnail And I”.

Apologies for not posting for a couple of days but I’ve been busy with other “real world” matters. I should warn you that I may be going on an even longer (two month) holiday if the blog doesn’t fair well in the Blog Thunderdome over the next week (or however long it takes?) Still, this might give me the chance to actually finish some things that have been on the go for a while – or at least get them more “advanced” anyhow. Rest assured though I’ll still be around on the Internet somewhere – either on someone else’s blog or working on the new design for The Temple or whatever.

I’m getting a bit sick of “tip jars” lately in my web travels. These insipid little things are now proliferating the blogosphere like Tribbles in an old Star Trek adventure. My God there’s even a site dedicated to those things so it proves that anyone will make a site about anything!

But I digress, back to tip jars. First off, what’s the point? Most of the people blogging are doing it on free blog sites anyway so there’s not really any costs involved. Sure, so you want a book, a CD, a friggin iPod – but why the heck do I have to pay for it? I mean what are you blogging for in the first place? If it’s a “commercial” venture then run some damn advertising on your site! Nothing wrong with that. Call a spade a damn spade for Gods sake. Don’t call it “an extended earth cutting and lifting device” and expect me to buy into it. You might not make that much money from the advertising, but how much are you making from your tip jar anyway?

I guess it would be cool to be able to make a bit of money from your blogging – after all I wouldn’t be running Google Adsense at the end of each post if it wasn’t. How much am I making? I don’t think I’m allowed to say (due to Google guidelines) but I’m reasonably happy so far – considering I don’t actually have to do anything except add a bit of code to WordPress. In fact I’m so impressed that I’m now looking seriously into integrating Adsense on The REG Temple and, hopefully, making a small fortune from it. With about 1.8 million hits a year on the Temple it’s well worth the effort. Even The Speckled Band got 85,000 hits last month (and is well on the way to passing that this month) so that’s pretty damn healthy. Of course many of those will be Blog Explosion “click throughs”, but there’s a lot of stayers/readers as well. If even 1% of those people click on a Google ad then it’s looking good, money wise.

So would this mean I was – or want to become – a professional blogger? Hell, why not? Anything that brings in a little extra money is OK…..providing of course you don’t let it rule your life or dictate what you say on your site. Not that Google Adsense can really do that anyway (as far as I know) as they’re just random text links. Sponsorship, however, would be a much different beast! Sponsorship can make reasonable people sound stupid and stupid people sound reasonable! It can really screw around with the psyche of a consumer if you let it! Since I’m not really “driven” by money, per se’, (though I’m not opposed to it either, obviously) I don’t think I’ll change what I’m doing to any great degree.

So the tip jars…..Well? I’m thinking of maybe creating my own tip jar button graphic which, when people click on it, will lead them to a page with a random quote generator giving them “tips” on what they can do with their damn money! I’m not sure if anyone else has tried that idea before, but it’s the sort of thing you’d expect to see at some stage during your surfing experience.

Just read the blog – and keep your money!

This entry was posted on Monday, July 11th, 2005 at 3:42 pm and is filed under Blogs, The Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.