How To Not Make Money Online

Two things came together yesterday to clarify my thinking on this blogging business. The first has been happening for a while and I have mentioned before: I am following ProBlogger's series on Strategic Blogging. Although it concentrates on making money from blogging (essentially through advertising), the series is a constructive read for any blogger.

The second thing that happened was rather more complicated and requires me to tell you a little story. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin...

Years ago, when my son, Mad, was just getting into web development, he persuaded me to take a series of online tutorials on HTML. As a result, I began to dabble in designing web pages with a view to perhaps setting up a home page for myself. And this required that I have a decent web page editor.

I can't remember how I first stumbled upon it, but I chose to download and install the CareWare editor, Arachnophilia. Although completely free, this is probably the best HTML editor on the planet; even Mad converted to it once he'd tried it.

So it was natural that, when confronted with the task of building the Writers Blog Alliance blog, I remembered Arachnophilia and thought it might come in useful. Off to the site I went and it was then that it all came flooding back to me. Arachnophilia's creator, Paul Lutus, requires that you read his Note About Freeware before downloading the program. It remains one of the most interesting documents on the net and I urge you to have a read.

Paul has this to say about how the internet has changed from its early beginnings: "The modern Internet has become a corporate playground, a commercial free-fire zone, and is about to become one interminable advertisement, an ideal only dreamt of by television producers."

This hit home with me, particularly as I have been thinking recently that I do not want to make money from the blog. I thought of all the blogs I've seen with ads plastered all over them, flashing and winking at us, desperately trying to distract our attention from the actual content of the blog. I thought of the inevitable Adsense boxes lying in wait for the expected click, the time wasted in watching pages load all their advertising, the scrolling required on some blogs to get down below the ads to the real meat of the post. I thought of the two Adsense ads on my own blog, those apparently innocent occupants of the sidebar, that are so often the cause of my blog loading slowly.

And I made a decision. I decided that my blog would become ad-free, a statement against this mad proliferation of advertising, a demonstration that the mere pocket money they make for the vast majority of bloggers is just not worth their insistent interference, their careless destruction of some otherwise elegant and clean designs, their insidious spread into all the blogs. It is time that the blogosphere woke up and smelled the coffee; advertising for 90% of us is not worth the pain and ugliness it causes. Forget the joy and satisfaction of those tiny payments you receive at rare intervals; remember how your blog is disfigured in the cause of making you a few cents.

It's all about why we blog. Very few of us intend to earn a living off our blogs; we may dream but we know in our hearts that it just isn't going to happen. For those who are determined make blogging a paying proposition, I say fine, ProBlogger has demonstrated that it is possible and I wish you the best of luck in your endeavors. But for the rest of us, the millions who blog for other reasons, advertising makes no sense at all. We should ditch it and do the blogosphere a favor.

It is very likely that my two Adsense ads are still there in the sidebar, glaring at you as you read this. But I assure you that I have spoken to Mad on the subject and they will be disappearing soon. This blog is going to make a stand against the invasion of commercialism and become a shining light of ad-lessness in the blogosphere.

Having had my rant, I want to return briefly to the subject of Paul Lutus and Arachnophilia. Have a look at Paul's explanation of the CareWare principle and consider that the following is all he wants in return for his excellent program:

"For example, here is a payment I will accept for a copy of Arachnophilia -

To own Arachnophilia, I ask that you stop whining about how hard your life is, at least for a while. When Americans whine, nearly everybody else in the world laughs. We have so much, and yet we manage to:

* Overlook great examples of beauty around us,

* Miss our most important opportunities,

* Make ourselves miserable by expecting something even better to come along."

I don't know how it's possible to read that and not smile and wish him well in his efforts.