Find The Boots

Regular readers have seen me lament the pitiful state of advertising income from even fairly popular blogs. I think the entire model of monetizing the traffic via a blog with contextual advertising has serious issues. Just like delayed and transferred viewing is causing the TV networks fits, contextual advertising isn't working well as a business model either. Eventually, the content is going to have to be paid for.

Not in our case -- for us it's about having fun. We're not doing this to make money. They rest of you are just along for the ride.

I noticed in one of the venture rags that Pay Per Post had just received some VC funding. It's apparent that the new dot-com bubble is going strong. I went ahead and signed up with them to see what it looks like. My supposition was that if a blogger really could make money just from writing posts it might very well change the landscape.

So the first opportunity I've taken is to write about PPP Direct. Here's how it works. The blogger puts a widget on their blog that allows advertisers to contact them directly to write a post. The blogger says something like "I'll write a post for you for $10" on their blog and the advertiser can contact them directly. PPC only takes a 10% cut, which evidently is a lot less than their competitors. They also handle all the tax issues -- you'll get a 1099 at the end of the tax year. It's a far cleaner arrangement than trying to work of the deals yourself.

If you've got a big time blog you could monetize it pretty well. What would someone pay for a review on Gizmodo?

According to the PPP website, I'm going to be paid $10 for writing this post. That's the most revenue from a post we've ever seen here at FTB. I'll let you know how it works out.