I’m Running Ads Now

I have produced Just Wrought for about eight months now: a hugely fun, time-sucking, gut-wrenching adventure.  Honestly, I did not expect to make as many new friends as I have here in this short time.  What a delightfully unexpected added benefit to an endeavor for which I anticipated nothing in return except the satisfaction of finally saying publically what I was already telling any weary colleague willing to share a beer or coffee with me.  Recently, however, I was offered another unlooked-for opportunity for compensation, this one a bit more negotiable as legal tender.  Specifically, a company called TicketNetwork inquired about whether I would be willing to run a short text blurb in exchange for a monthly payment that was in the neighborhood of the combined costs of running the site.  I knee-jerked negatively at first: “What would ads say about my motivations for ranting?”  But when I really thought it through, I could not come up a single good reason not to run some advertising on the site so long as it:

• Occupied a relatively small amount of space,
• Did not come with any editorial quid pro quos attached, either explicitly or implicitly,
• Was for a product or service generally inoffensive to myself or my readership as I understand them.

On the other hand, I could rather easily see some reasons for running some revenue generating content:

1. The site costs money: not much but some.  I already subsidize much of my artistic efforts with an unrelated day job.  If the blog can pay for itself--disregarding for now the still uncompensated time it takes me to create the content-- then all the better.
2. A company willing to pay to appear on the site means someone believes the site reaches people.  That is a belief I tend to want to share and reinforce.
3. NewsWrights United is currently working on the second edition of A Living Newspaper.  (You can learn more about NewsWrights , and keep up to date on our doings by “liking” our FaceBook page, click here.)  This new edition, titled The New New News, will cover the current mega-crisis of journalism.  As a contributing playwright/reporter, one of my assigned beats is on-line monetization, i.e. how do the sites where we  get our news pay for themselves, or not?  Believing that one of the best ways to know a subject is to live it, I welcome this chance to try and monetize my own site, and understand the challenges from the inside.

So, all of the above considered I decided to go ahead with this next step in my blogging adventures.  The ad appears in the right hand column under a heading called “Links.”

Everything I do here at Just Wrought is to some degree an experiment in which I welcome your feedback, positive and negative.  This step is no different.  I really would like to hear your thoughts about my decision to run this modest advertisement.  And in the future, I trust you will keep me honest, letting me know if the ads become too numerous, distracting or inappropriate, or worse still, if it seems like they are skewing my message.

Comments

[Darian]

If you can get the blog to pay for itself and you do it by advertising tickets to shows, then I say "go for it!"