Kiyoshi Martinez - nerdlusus blog the geek wants out

Why I won’t run advertisements on AngryJournalist.com

A few friends of mine asked me why I refused to put up advertising on AngryJournalist.com, even something as simple as a few text ads from Google AdSense despite it being relatively successful in terms of traffic. I have a few reasons for this.

First, I really dislike advertising. I run the Adblock plugin on my Firefox browser, and can’t stand bad advertising placement on Web sites. I find them simply annoying and I also wanted the site to be mobile friendly.

Secondly, while I think good advertising placement is possible and very necessary for lots of sites to survive financially, I didn’t need the advertising dollars. The cost of hosting and domain registration was less than I spend on comic books in a given week, so recuperating the cost isn’t that important to me.

Third, I’ve recently become a huge fan of the idea of “free” as it applies to the Internet and communications. Specifically, I speak about Chris Anderson’s new book, “Free,” (see a related video of his Nokia World speech that does a great job explaining the concept) and also I’d just started to read Kevin Kelly’s chapter on why the Internet rewards generosity from his book “New Rules for the New Economy.”

To me, these concepts are fascinating and I think they’re important economic models to consider when doing anything online, even something as simple as AngryJournalist.com, because it’s training your mind to think of different ways to bring content to users without using traditional forms of revenue. I wanted to challenge myself to find a non-typical way to make money, but also to do something that embraced the idea of “free.”

Fourth, I felt that if I pasted tons of advertising all over the site, people would not only be distracted from the content — angry journalists ranting about their jobs — but also think I was being opportunistic and trying to turn a quick buck. I’m not against making money or covering costs, but for me the lack of advertising added some credibility to the core mission of the site. There’s already enough people taking advantage of frustrated journalists.

So, how do I plan to monetize the site? I’d rather not say just yet, as I’m not even sure if I’m going to bother to do anything. For now, I’ll just let this experiment continue its course.

Technorati Tags: angryjournalist.com, advertising, free, new+economy, WIRED, Kevin+Kelly, Chris+Anderson, free

[...] + PeriodistaCabreado.com - A Spanish-language version of AngryJournalist.com, which I’m really excited about. I was actually asked by several people if I’d thought about doing a Spanish version of the site, and while I really liked the idea, there wasn’t a practical way for me to moderate it because I don’t speak any foreign languages. Thankfully, the site’s creator decided to do his own version and I told him the basic template ideas I used. He’s got advertising up, however, that’s his choice to make. I still haven’t changed my mind on not having advertising. [...]