Money for Blogging and Your Chicks for Free

April 23, 2001 11:34 PM

Blogging for cash? Anyone think that there's any sort of business model that could be applied towards weblogging? I've been thinking about something along the lines of text advertising, a-la Google's AdWords.
posted by owillis to general weblog-related at 11:34 PM (9 comments total)

Isn't Jorn trying something like this? Although I have to say I haven't seen a single ad on his site yet.
posted by lia at 12:06 AM on April 24, 2001

Jorn says he wants to try something like that, but he can't bring himself to actually do it. Passive-aggressive relationship to money, it seems to me...

But if we move away from a-list blogs, there's a whole subculture that used to be E/N sites. I've noticed a lot of E/N sites have banner ads and such ... but then, many of those don't pretense to being personal sites, just fun webzines that are incidentally by one person.
posted by dhartung at 1:00 AM on April 24, 2001

hrm, funny characterization, Dan... I've noticed the banner ads and things on E/N sites too but something else I noticed, or thought I noticed, is that E/N sites seem more likely than Just Plain Weblogs to be run by groups.

Which probably, if so, would strengthen your point, so it's a useless quibble, and may in fact not even be an accurate observation anyway. But it's my fondness for useless quibbling that leads me to ponder the distinctions between weblogs and E/N sites, so.
posted by Sapphireblue at 9:47 AM on April 24, 2001

The way in which weblogs and E/N sites evolved probably has something to do with the implicit rules that were defined when the terms were defined. The original definition of a weblog seemed to be a personal site with daily-ish updates, usually pointing to interesting sites and articles on the web. I'm not all that familiar with the E/N community, but I imagine whoever came up with the term defined to a certain extent the evolution of the genre.

As the definitions of each have expanded, however, they overlap more and more. It' an interesting phenomenon, anyway.
posted by daveadams at 9:57 AM on April 24, 2001

You know what? There are some weblogs (misnomer) which I would gladly utilize Micropayments for, assuming that it was a donation and not a requirement.
posted by fooljay at 10:39 AM on April 24, 2001

E/N (everything/nothing) sites evolved pretty much at the same time as weblogs. I think it's reasonably safe to say that the predecessor of both was Slashdot.

The possible distinction that I usually figure is the case is that E/N sites tend to go to pretty much any length to attract viewers, whereas weblogs tend to whine about not having enough hits.

Seriously. Visit an E/N site (the classic reference being Stileproject [um, adult content and whatnot]) and prepared to be disgusted.

Note that they aren't all as blatantly vulgar as Stileproject. Something Awful, the other commonly referred to E/N site is, at times, ignorant, offensive, and funny. But not usually as grotesque as Stile tries to be.

I'm pretty sure there are E/N sites out there that bitch and complain that Stile and Lowtax (Something Awful guy) always get referred to, when there's thousands and thousands of great sites that never get viewed.

To define it as vaguely as possible, weblogs always seem like happy fuzzy journals, and E/N sites seem like someone's balistic raging against society. But that's probably nowhere near accurate.
posted by cCranium at 11:52 AM on April 24, 2001

Micropayments and all, I think people are more willing to pay with their attention vs. cash...
posted by owillis at 1:16 PM on April 24, 2001

Screw micropayments, I'm perfectly willing to help Jorn with his "passive-aggressive relationship to money," as Dan put it. He can take the ad money, and give it to me, as I happen to have an amicable relationship with money of all denominations.
posted by lia at 11:02 PM on April 24, 2001

Argh.

StileProject is NOT considered "real" E/N, at least not amongst the E/N community. The whole "take a blog, then add boobies and shock pics" formula was definitely keyed by Stile, but is considered a subgenre at best. (I've heard the term "P/D/E/N" for porn/death/everything/nothing bandied about from time to time.)

"Real" E/N is pretty much what you'd expect from a weblog with a "staff" of posters: regularly posted thoughts and quips and links to funny things and political rambling and what they had for breakfast this morning. (A "history of E/N" of sorts is available here.) Sites that focus on "content" instead - be it pr0n/shock archives, flash animation, satirical articles, or whatever - are now about something, and thus pretty much lose their E/N label by definition. :-)

Sorry for the semantic quibbling. Seeing E/N repeatedly referred to as "oh, those shock value sites!" is one of the few things that raises my ire, that's all.
posted by youhas at 1:11 PM on April 26, 2001