As noted in the headline, there is an internet cottage industry of people getting paid to write online about how to get paid to write online. See websites like The Write Life, Making A Living Writing, and many more if you Google anything along the lines of “professional blogger”. It’s a weird, self-referential phenomenon.
Empowering writers to make more money is obviously something that I support, and I’ve read a million posts about upping your personal ROI. However, I do think these “Unlock your potential!” types of websites deceive readers. Maybe not directly. But here’s the reality, a reality that’s unprofitable to admit: There aren’t that many well-paying writing jobs out there; most people are neither lucky enough nor talented enough to get them.
(I kept this post in drafts for a while, but I realized that I don’t have anything else to add. So… here ya go, world.)
Writing about the fallibility of recorded memory, Walter Kirn cautions, “Despite our tendency in the computer age to think of ourselves as soft machines, the human mind is not a hard drive, a neutral repository of information.” Rather, “Memory is an imaginative act; first we imagine what we’ll want to keep and then we fashion stories from what we’ve kept. Memories don’t just happen, they are built.”
Beautifully put, and very true. We do not impartially, objectively store all of the information gathered by our senses (at least not in a retrievable way). We pick and choose the images and conversations that will create narratives, often self-serving ones, and reconstruct our stories every time we recall them.
Graffiti spotted in Portland, OR… if I remember rightly.
You can only trust your mind when it’s skeptical of its own results. Even then, are you sure that you’re sure? This is why eye-witness testimony is dangerous.
Dave Pell ruefully describes giving his son “paparazzi” treatment at the toddler’s birthday party, positing, “The digital age gives a new (and almost opposite) meaning to having a photographic memory. The experience of the moment has become the experience of the photo.”
What are we sacrificing when we save so many snapshots?
“The process of interpretation occurs at the very formation of memory—thus introducing distortion from the beginning. […] Rarely do we tell a story or recount events without a purpose. Every act of telling and retelling is tailored to a particular listener[.]”
“[T]he mere fault of being human results in distorted memory and inaccurate testimony.”
“What Facebook is doing—and not just Facebook, but nearly every disruptive Internet-based service from Uber to Amazon—is destroying all of the barriers between supply and demand. Moreover, this destruction isn’t really the fault of the destructors; it’s the natural outcome of the Internet, where distribution is free and marginal costs are zero. It’s the most important story of our time.”
Quote from the Daily Update email, 3/24/2015. I highly suggest subscribing.
For those who aren’t familiar, Get Off My Internets is a blog and forum that lampoons popular ladyblogs—fashion and “lifestyle” blogs especially. (I don’t mean ladyblogs like Jezebel or The Hairpin, but mostly personal blogs.) GOMI users are often decried as vitriolic bullies, a complaint that is not entirely wrong but also not entirely correct. Commenters can be mean, but often they have a point, like “shilling for every random company makes you look cheap and tasteless”.
High-profile bloggers with “snark threads” on GOMI should pay attention to what their detractors say, especially since GOMI commenters are avid readers of the blogs they enjoy trashing. Some bloggers recognize that GOMI runs the gamut: Mike Gilger of The Fresh Exchange wrote, “I expected to be upset and angered, but instead, by the time I got to the bottom of the forum, I was feeling inspired. It inspired me to start being more open about work, rather than […] vague about the actual struggles we reference. I want to find a more balanced way to show the beauty and the grit.”
GOMI creator and moderator Alice Wright told The Daily Dot that the forum’s enthusiasts are “people who work really hard and read blogs for entertainment. They get […] annoyed when bloggers post about their hard, busy days of going to aerobics class, eating a bowl of oatmeal, and taking a picture of it. And if readers want to offer any critique at all, bloggers don’t want to hear it.” Much of the anger on the forum is a reaction to clumsy monetization attempts that don’t respect readers’ intelligence.
If you would like to obsessively read more about GOMI, which is what I do whenever I discover something that interests me, I suggest 1) checking out the site itself, and 2) reading “Inside the Internet’s Craziest Destination for Blogger Hate” by Chavie Lieber. Then, yanno, do some Google work. Whatever. I’m not your mom.
So ANYWAY, when you set up your GOMI profile you can link to your personal blog or any other website that you want to promote. If you have the time and inclination to add more ~social media~ to your life, it’s a good idea.
Of course, be aware that using GOMI in a spammy way will not work. That is a terrible strategy. Don’t try to play SEO games or who-knows-what may have occurred to you. On the other hand, frequenting GOMI in a way that contributes to the community is fantastic PR for your blog. You are given an opportunity to demonstrate your valuable insights to people who are dedicated blog-readers. People who are critical thinkers (mostly). Pretty much the optimal audience, right?
A lot of “content creators” — the people who make the internet worthwhile — hate ad-blockers. I don’t. I am glad that ad-blockers exist, and I think they’re actually good for the future of “content” and editorial websites in general.
First let’s review the argument against ad-blockers. (Note that sketchy ad-blockers do exist, but assume I’m talking about normal ones like uBlock Origin.) Basically, ad-blockers stop display ads from loading. This means that websites can’t make any money from the visitors who use these browser extensions. (The idea that web ads only pay per click is a common misconception — most professional websites are paid per thousand views.)
Here’s what I think: Making money from advertising is not an inherently terrible plan. Making money from display ads is. Banner ads and noisy autoplay videos are not the only option! Dreaded paywalls are not the only alternative. (Besides, subscriptions won’t be sufficient unless you have a premium legacy brand like The New York Times, or niche appeal like Andrew Sullivan’s political commentary.) Here is an example of what a respectful ad looks like:
Please consider shopping through our Amazon affiliate link to support this website. We rely on readers like you to keep creating the [content type] that you love!
This is basically how fashion bloggers do it, although some of them are less obvious about disclosing their affiliate links. The techies may not have noticed, but fashion and lifestyle bloggers are doing well for themselves! You should be copying them. There are plenty of affiliate programs, and a website with a decent amount of traffic can probably make more money from this type of advertising than from display ads. (Granted, some of the protests were written years ago, so this may not have been true at the time.)
The other excellent idea is sponsored posts. Ars Technica contributor Kurt Mackey commented on the article that I linked above, “There are really two possibilities […]. The first is what we’re striving for: finding the least offensive level of advertising […] while keeping our overhead as low as we can. The second is scary and more malicious, and if Ars ever went this way I would no longer work here: disguising ads as content.” I agree, but sponsored posts don’t have to be disguised. All you need is a disclaimer. Example:
The following post is sponsored by [commercial entity]. Please consider doing business with the brands that support [website]. Thank you!
Readers have been duly informed, and they can scroll past if they don’t want to read an advertorial. Actually, the best type of sponsored post has that disclaimer at the top, and then normal content below that is vaguely related to the field of the sponsoring entity. Here is an example from a Medium article by Jason Harper, “In Defense of the Good Old-Fashioned Map”:
The disclaimer could be a little more explicit — “Sponsored by Marriott” would be better than “Presented by Marriott” — but in general this is well-executed. The visual experience is not annoying, I get to read something enjoyable, and I will associate my happy internet feelings with Marriott. Win-win-win for the creator, the advertiser, and the reader.
People who protest sponsored posts are generally concerned with objectivity. For instance, if you review a product that was sent to you for free, and the company is paying you to review it, can you offer an unbiased review of that product? Well, no, of course not. Presumably the people who worry about this are the same people who complain when news writers use personal pronouns.
What the critics don’t seem to realize is that objectivity is not a thing. It straight-up doesn’t exist. Literally every single person in the entire world is biased — deeply biased — in one way or another, because that is human nature. We’re irrational animals, not logical automatons. The important thing is to declare your biases, for example by disclaiming the sponsored nature of a blog post.
So why do I think ad-blocking will be good for the future of the internet? Because it will push websites to rely less on irritating ads, and implement user-friendly business models instead (which may include sensible advertising). Sure, plenty of websites will be unethical and not use disclaimers, but that’s why we have to be discerning, skeptical consumers, both of media and any products we choose to purchase.
Too long; didn’t read? Here’s my basic point: it is worthwhile to develop a revenue stream that doesn’t annoy your readers so much that they block the revenue stream altogether.
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