Blogging and Advertisements: Where’s the line?
So here’s a meta-post for you:
What do I do about all these offers to advertise on my blog? How can I say yes? Or, more importantly, how can I say no?
My blog garners moderate traffic — generally between 1500 and 2000 hits a day, although that number jumps considerably when I have a post up at The Hairpin (or a new post on the blog). That’s by no means rockstar traffic. But I nevertheless receive at least one email every week offering compensation for various forms of advertisement, from streaming car videos to links to other celebrity sites.
Now, this isn’t an elaborate humblebrag — most of these solicitors most likely see the “celebrity” in my blog title and little else — but it does bring up a genuine question concerning blogging (and “academic” blogging in particular) and compensation.
As I tweeted a few weeks ago, a decent blog post of average length (around 2000 words) takes at least four hours to complete. With zero compensation, I am paid zero dollars an hour for that work. But then again, I am also paid zero dollars an hour for the work I put in on every academic article, and am at times even asked to pay for the privilege of submitting my work for potential publication. I am effectively paying to do work so that massive academic publishing companies can make money by selling their journals at exorbitant rates to libraries.
But my blog is not peer-reviewed. It will not get me tenure, although, as Jason Mittell points out in his recent post on blogging and its relationship to tenure, a blog may not = tenure, but it will increasingly be considered part of the constellation of a candidate’s body of scholarship. It may not be as serious (or proof-read) or vetted as the work that he/she does for, say, Cinema Journal, but it’s still an extension of the scholar’s thought process and (as loathe as I know many are to use this word) their academic “image.”
For many reasons, some warranted, others silly, academia and “making money” have been deemed mutually exclusive. In other words, scholarship that turns a profit is suspect; work that sells to libraries and other academics is highly valued. It follows, then, that a blog that makes any sort of profit is, by default, not as serious or academic (or valuable, ironically) as a blog that does not have advertisements. I can understand the rationale — an academic’s work should not be biased by sponsors — but I cannot understand the poverty mentality. Perhaps I’ve lived too long with the economic realities of being an academic in the humanities, and am too much in debt: but this is bullshit. I really like writing this blog, but I’m working so hard on actually making money to pay off my loans that I can’t write nearly as often as I’d like. Obviously this situation is ridiculous.
But because I have a a job, and am no longer on the market, I made an executive decision. When an ad salesman emailed me asking if I’d put a non-obstrusive link to AT&T U-Verse on my homepage and, in exchange, he’d pay me $200 for every six months that I stayed there, I went for it. Was I implicitly endorsing U-Verse? Perhaps. Was I explicitly doing so? Not at all. Was I finally being compensated for intellectual labor? Yes. Did you, as a reader, get pissed at me and think that I had compromised my academic ethics? You tell me.
I started thinking about Google Ads. What if I just put a little banner on the side? Is that okay? You’re exposed to Google Ads all day, every day — and they don’t make you think less of various sites; they only make you realize that they have an imperative to actually turn a profit if they wish to employ writers and pay them salaries and give them health benefits. But here’s the ridiculous thing: after four months of using Google Ads, four months of 1,000-2,000 people a day seeing a banner directed towards them (but not necessarily clicking through on said banner), do you know how much I earned? GUESS.
No seriously, guess.
I bet your guess was nowhere near…..
20 CENTS!
I’m yanking these ads soon — the visual distraction (and clear commerciality) is not worth less than half a cent a day. I think most readers would agree that it’s okay to get paid something to blog, so long as it doesn’t compromise the integrity of the blog. But the other day I received an interesting offer — one on which I’d like your advice, whether as an academic or a non-academic.
On Monday, I received the following email:
Hello,
I was doing research for one of my clients and came across your web page - annehelenpetersen.com. Your site stands out as an excellent candidate for a partnership with my client. Specifically, they are interested in placing a resource on one of your pages that would be relevant to your content and useful to your visitors.
You would receive compensation in exchange for your partnership as well as relevant future partnership offers. I would appreciate the chance to discuss this proposal in further detail. Please let me know if you have any interest, and I’ll send you specifics.
Thanks in advance!
Seemed pretty vague, but I thought I’d see what this person had to offer. I requested further details, and the guy, who works at an ad company, responded with the following:
Thanks for your response. The client is the Nipissing University and they’re just looking for a simple anchor text link. Here are the details:
We would like to use this page:
http://www.annehelenpetersen.com/?p=2413
The placement would be in a short sentence with the anchor text: masters of education
We would prefer that the link be placed within your existing content near the sentence in the second paragraph of the section SECOND, THE JOB : My undergraduate and M.A. degrees qualify me to teach English; my five years of teaching experience qualify me to teach; my two summers teaching gifted and talented high school students qualified me to teach high school students.
We must first check with the client to confirm the specific sentence and placement and permission to use the page. Hopefully this email provides you with a basic idea of what we’d like. I will follow up shortly with the sentence and wording we want so you know exactly what we’re looking for.
We can pay $25.00 a month for this link in this format on your site. Once the link is up, we can remit payment using PayPal immediately and use an auto-pay system that will post your payments on the same day each month. Is this the correct e-mail address for your PayPal account?
We work with a number of reputable clients in various verticals and will continue to offer you additional relevant link opportunities once we’ve established a partnership. Thanks again! I look forward to working with you.
To summarize: I would need to place a link to Nipissing University, a public, liberal arts institution in Ontario, in the body of the blog post that I wrote last year about getting my job here at The Putney School. I wouldn’t need to explicitly endorse it, but in the paragraph where I mention my teaching experience and M.A., that link would need to pop up.
The first question is whether or not it would be ethical for me to accept this sort of advertising. (Is it ethical that I have that link to U-Verse over there? You tell me). The second, more complicated question, and on on which I am honestly confused, is whether an ostensibly “academic” blog should accept advertising at all.
16 Responses to “Blogging and Advertisements: Where’s the line?”
There’s one caveat to your argument that scholarship that makes money is suspect - that would be the Gold Standard for most tenure cases, the scholarly monograph/book. Books /do/ earn an author money - not enough to live off of, or very much at all in some cases, but there is still some money coming in to an author. And that’s for many scholars the most highly regarded scholarly production out there. Furthermore, if your blog is a precursor to you eventually publishing a book, why couldn’t you get paid for some of the work “up front” (just from a different source than greedy scholarly publishers)?
I don’t have an answer for you about whether it’s ethical for you to accept advertising, but perhaps another idea to consider - I don’t see any ads at all with my Google Chrome Adblock extension, so whether a blog, site, etc. has an ad on it to make money for their intellectual work - I don’t see it. There are other similar extensions out there for Firefox that I think many (but certainly not everyone) use. That would make me inclined to say that if you’d like to make $25/month linking to a university (which many of my high school friends attended and my cousin currently attends), go for it - you wouldn’t be “bothering” every single person who visits the page, anyway.
First off, 1500-2K hits a day?!? Not a blog rockstar, but I’d wager that puts you way up on the academic blogging Hit Parade. Congratulations!
Accordingly, you should get something back for your work.
As you say, most of our scholarship not only is unpaid; it actually costs us money (and in many cases, lots of it) to produce. The central argument is that our continued employment is compensation for our scholarship, but that puts us in a position not unlike student athletes: keep producing, or you’re cut from the team. We’re increasingly in a position, due to not only blogging but many varieties of self-publication, to actually make a bit of money from our work, beyond the small royalties we get from traditional publication. And we should collect on that potential.
In an era of tenuous incomes and rising costs, it seems quixotic (at best) to cling to some sort of puritanical “not for sale” perspective. That said, you should only enter agreements to host advertising that you’re comfortable with. The interesting thing about the two “big money” examples you mention is that the more intrusive one comes from the more “compatible” source: a university. I might have reservations about AT&T (even though I am a U-Verse customer!), but in this case the deal seems somewhat reasonable.
The bottom line is that just as we’ve always had to make ethical choices about our scholarship and teaching, we’ll now have to make them about how our work is sold. Given that it may indeed be sold by our publishers and employers whether we want it to be or not, the most ethical thing to do would be to determine its worth and protect its value ourselves, before some sort of blanket deal is imposed on us.
Interesting questions here.
I think there is an easy answer and a more complex one.
The easy answer is: GET YOURS. You are already doing this labor for free, being “paid” only in the satisfaction you get from writing and the interest of your readers, who engage in your work. Why not receive payment for something you already do?
The more complicated answer is this: as a reader of blogs, I often view those plastered with ads with suspicion. It’s not that I see rigorous academic writing and paid advertisements as antithetical. However, their marriage can become problematic when the advertising begins to alter the content, when, for example, you are asked to promote a product within a post (I once received an offer of this kind and turned it down for that reason). When I read a blog and can tell that they are being asked to promote a new show, service, etc., I immediately view the content with suspicion.
So my 2 cents would be: if you feel you can keep the ad from influencing what you write, then the presence of ads on your site would not impact my desire to read it or the way I process its content. Also, no ads featuring boobs or penises. But you knew that.
Good luck, I’ll be interested to see what you decide to do…
All of this is excellent (and much-appreciated) advise. Derek, I definitely see the iffiness of U-Verse, in part because, well, we all kinda hate media consolidation, but then again, I also blog about and explicitly endorse News Corp. media products, and Murdoch most certainly doesn’t pay me $200 every six months. Again, where’s the line?
Amanda, I totally agree re: cluttered sites. My favorite gossip site (Lainey Gossip) has become a pop-up hell in recent weeks, and it’s significantly decreased my desire to actually read the site. While I don’t think I’ll ever go the way of pop-ups, I do wonder if academic presses will ever consider using our sites the way they use the back pages of the SCMS schedule….
I actually don’t mind the clutter so much as the suspicion that the content has been compromised. Also, shots of boobs. Can’t stress that enough. No boobs.
Your idea about academic presses putting ads on like-minded academic blogs is actually pretty brilliant. If it’s not already happening somewhere you need to pitch that!
Agreed about Lainey, also because I can’t access posts through my RSS feed. I don’t mind clicking through sometimes, but if I know that clicking on it will slow my computer down for the length the page is open, I’m less likely to click. (Same goes for Go Fug Yourself, which I also love and visit less than I would like).
And in reference to the OP….you should definitely go for it. I never begrudge ads, even for the sites I cite above. Too much good writing on the Internet goes unrewarded. If you’ve got the opportunity and don’t have to alter your content, go for it.
There is nothing wrong with getting paid for the work you do. As a social worker I am not well paid, but I do run into the idea that I should be doing this work because it is “fulfilling”, not because I expect to make money. But what about paying for my daily needs? It is similar for an academic. Just because you are doing work that you may find “fulfilling” doesn’t mean you have to give up your ability to survive. Unless you are getting money for taking advantage of someone, which you wouldn’t be, then it’s fair game.
I don’t think advertising in general is a conflict, as long as it stays away from your writing. When it comes to advertising on your blog, I would keep it outside of your text. When you include a link in your text, it is usually a page the blogger has purposely linked to, making your endorsement explicit, whether or not you meant to.
We are told time and time again, “Do what you love and the money will follow.” This blog, I think, is your labor of love and you’ve been educating us-your readers-without compensation for far too long. I have complete faith that you’ll never end up in a position where you are compromising your voice and opinions in order to keep certain advertisers happy.
I absolutely agree with going for it at your own speed and according to your own discretion. I agree with Amanda that breasts should be avoided. All in all, you will probably be (inadequately) paying yourself back for all the money you shelled out for conferences, etc.
Oh, and the jokes on U-verse. I’m not buying cable just because it’s next to that fabulous picture of Clark Gable decked out in fur.
Don’t sell out, Annie!!! :[
First off, like Derek, I’d emphasize that your traffic is not small change in the academic blogosphere. (And thanks for the link, given that your blog is 10x more read than mine!)
I think there’s nothing wrong with ads as long as you’re transparent enough to make it clear about any potential conflicts of interest, or the like. And you do deserve some compensation, especially given that the indirect benefits of blogging I discussed are not relevant in your position. But putting a link in the middle of a post seems a bit too far for me - it seems like it’s part of your content, not just a random link popping up from Google. (And really? .20? Damn…) Maybe if you could clearly box it up as an ad, but if it’s a hotlink from your text, that seems like an unmarked endorsement. But striking that balance is key.
Something in me rebels against the very idea of accepting advertising-and I say this as a historian, not as someone who reads and enjoys your blog and thinks you deserve all sorts of good things.
The inevitability of advertising becoming the default method of payment for content producers has been challenged rather successfully and repeatedly in historical studies, yet again and again we see the web being colonized by advertising dollars (both explicit and the more dangerous hidden database collection).
In my daydreams, I imagine a world were we pay for the content we want directly rather than allowing intermediaries (sponsors, ratings agencies, Facebook) to determine value and worth. I’d sort of love to see bloggers experiment more with alternative income generation, even developing some new models of their own (scholars in particular can chalk this up to research-bonus!).
But if you are asking whether I will think less of you or your blog if I see an add on the site? No, I won’t. But I will hope to see more posts like this so we can learn the mechanics of the blogger/advertiser relationship and then question the evolving business model of the blogosphere with concrete data.
Glad you wrote this. Thanks.
I actually had to CTRL F to even find the U-Verse ad you are talking about in this post. I think that if the ads you agree to are similar to that one, go for it. It’s small and unobtrusive.
seems fair to me to get money in exchange for producing work others consume and enjoy.
then again, academics in the humanities are so often taught that all we deserve in exchange for the work we produce is crippling insecurity with occasional moments of self-satisfaction. on special days, you might even get to pay to have your work published.
so i say take the money and run. you deserve it.
For me, to advertise or not rests on the relationship between two things: the content of the blog and the content of the ad. If it’s a good match then the arrangement is beneficial for all parties - you, your readers and the advertisers. Google ads didn’t work for your site because Google ads are cheap and mindless, whereas your writing - and your readers - are not. The ads didn’t get enough click throughs, so you didn’t make any money.
If you are the one responsible for blog content, then by extension you are also responsible for the kind of ads that appear on your site and the people, places or products they sell. Your endorsement of whatever the ad is selling is implied simply by virtue of it existing on your site, next to your writing. You chose to give it space.
If an advertiser is selling something you believe in, there’s no harm in giving it space on your site. If you like it, chances are your readers will too. If you don’t like it, don’t do it. Ethical or not, giving advertising space to things you know nothing about (and therefore can’t personally endorse) or things that don’t share your values, feels dishonest.
I’ve been struggling with similar questions myself. I have nowhere near your traffic, but I have had a few offers. I think it’s essential to keep the ads out of your text. Other than that, I think it’s fair to make money. It’s so complicated!