Some minor issues

Click and stick: $5

So what’s the thing with monetization? For starters: this blog is my playground and my hobby. It’s not my work. I don’t need it to make money here. It hardly cost me anything (hosting is provided by my buddy Serge .. and I guess I still need to pay him some domain name fees ) except a decent amount of time. The things I learn is what I earn and so are the people I connect to. My reputation, I guess ..
On the other hand, I don’t feel dirty if I make some bucks with blogging. Working in advertising myself I’m quite interested in how blogs can spread your message. And there are many models to that. Paying bloggers is only one way of doing things, and then there’s a difference between display ads or commercial content creation.

As far as I’m concerned, I don’t say no to anything .. by default. This means you can knock on my door as much as you like. I’ll listen. But I don’t guarantee I accept your offer anyway. There’s a big chance I might not.

As for display ads, I hooked up with Adhese’ Enchant? program. From time to time they run a campaign, and though I’m not selected that much I earned some money with it. It’s just a banner, and it’s clear it’s commercial. I don’t think I’d refuse something easily, unless it’s a product or idea I really detest. Honestly, I think Adhese made bad judgment embracing the CPC or CPM principle. They used to pay a flat fee per week. Being a marketeer myself I totally understand why advertisers kept asking for CPC/SPM. Being a blogger on the other hand I can’t understand Adhese went with this. It’s perhaps a little nuance, but in my mind it show understanding and embracing of the niche concept. Anyway, I leave this discussion for another time. I love what Adhese has done (and is doing) in Belgium. They have great products and seems to know the Belgian bloggers quite well.

Apart from real display ads I run some experiments from time to time. Going from a job offer widget to an Amazon affiliation code on my book links. Didn’t earn much with it.

Then there’s sponsored content integration, and this is where it becomes tricky. Would you write something for money? Bon ton reply is: yes, if I can say say I want. As if these people can rise above this. I’m well aware people slightly shift opinions if they get payed for something. And yes, I doesn’t have to be much, there’s a psychological theory to that. The lower the reward, the more they shift opinion, because they don’t want to feel abused. They think they speak freely, but the change of opinion happened before they speak at all.
I’m not above this myself. I KNOW I’m vulnerable to this. So I promised myself having to say what I want isn’t enough. I’m not sure how I can deal with this, but I want to be aware. I hope this at least helps my judgment. Most important rule I’d like to follow is that the case has to relevant for myself or my blog.

By incidence (NOT of course, it’s the reason for this post) I recently got 2 offers to illustrate this.
1. I got an email invite from Scarlett de Courcier of Unruly Media who asked me if I’d like to post a video about Microsoft Surface on my blog. There was a youTube link, but I could as well subscribe for a program of theirs that could offer the video commercially. Every time someone from the UK views the video, I would gain some money (18 cents I learned later). I decide to go along with this because, in the first place, I thought the video was something for this blog. And so I posted the video here with some thoughts about the campaign (I wasn’t asked for). I’m not sure I’m going to make a decent amount of money out of it (I guess not) but the content of the video was relevant, so I went for it. Later I learned Unruly Media has a quite interesting ethics code.

2. Some time ago there was a PHD student doing research concerning blogs and advertising. His name is Tom Michiels and he’s working for a firm called Quero Media (but the initiative is set-up by something called uMarket.it). He asked if I was interested in commercial posts, and as I explained above, I don’t say no on forehand.
So I got an offer, which I decided to decline. To participate I just had to write a post about a burger restaurant and mention a product of theirs: Quick ’n Toast or Supr?me Pepper. It would be easy money, the pay is decent .. but not relevant to this blog, so no go. I just mention the name of the parties involved because I like they use blogs to experiment with their marketing, so I’m not judging them at all!! But in this case, I decided to step down because it’s not relevant to me and I would feel compromised as a result of it.

So in the end, it’s about context and relevance again

To conclude: if I want to make big bucks with this I guess I just need to post more and spend more time investigating and enriching these experiments. As for now, I’ll just see what’s happening as it happens. If I earn some money: fine, that’s fun. That’s just not my main objective.

Perhaps I should try Google Adsense again. I kind of strongly believe in contextual advertising. But I was kicked from the program some years ago (alleged clickfraud). Perhaps they want to be friends again