>Why does your personal website need sponsorship at all? Why should people pay you for it? This commercial mindset is very weird to me.
Because personal blogging can also be a business for some?
It's not like every personal blog does it -- the huge majority are their for free, with no ads or anything. But if you devote the time and effort, and have an audience, why not?
It's like saying pro dancers shouldn't exist, because tons of people also dance for free.
So we should applaud pro dancers when they announce on a public forum that they're no longer selling your dance-viewing habits to marketers? Like I said, it's not good. It's just less bad.
This is attention seeking for commercial reasons. After looking around a bit it's clear this is not a personal website. It's a promotional commercial website for this guy's workshop and speaking business that uses the 'blog' format for some of the content.
I'm not denying the effort or the quality content in some of his posts. I just see no reason at all to celebrate him here.
>So we should applaud pro dancers when they announce on a public forum that they're no longer selling your dance-viewing habits to marketers?
Whether we should that or not, this is a totally orthogonal issue.
Your "so", which implies that what you ask was somehow suggested by my comment, is a non sequitur.
I responded to the question of why do people feel justified to monetize their blogs.
>I'm not denying the effort or the quality content in some of his posts. I just see no reason at all to celebrate him here.
Well, I never said we should celebrate him. Just that someone wanting to make money from their blog can be justified.
But if you want to hear my opinion on this too, then even if you consider monetizing a blog bad (to which I disagree) or if you consider selling audiences info to marketers bad (to which I agree), what he did should still be celebrated.
Why? Obviously because people should be encouraged not only when they do good, but also when they STOP doing something bad.
That's how we get more people to stop doing bad things: by celebrating those who forgo their bad habits.
I don't know--GP post has a valid point of view even if people disagree. I also feel it takes a bit of nerve to think that you should be financially compensated for writing your personal blog, no matter how big your audience is or how much time or effort you devote to it. Just because you CAN monetize something doesn't mean you should.
>I also feel it takes a bit of nerve to think that you should be financially compensated for writing your personal blog //
Surely it depends on whether you're writing for your own benefit or the benefit of others. If you write to benefit - by the action, catharsis, etc., of writing - yourself then of course not but if you write to entertain, inform, etc. others then it seems reasonable that those who consume that writing to that end should get their costs covered in some way.
I guess we could have arms length government managed blogging platforms, that would enable people to blog, others to consume the beneficial ones and avoid commercial entities being involved in the system (I think if you look current free blogging platforms probably can be traced back to advertised commercial entities?).
It probably all depends on what sort of profit a blog is making. If they're actually paying themselves a living wage from their personal blog then arguably that shows it has value and that they should be socially allowed the opportunity to be paid (through the proxy of advertising) for that blog. I'd warrant from my experience that most blogs don't cover costs with the advertising they carry if you considered the act of writing them a commercial undertaking (eg UK min wage is ~£8 ph, so a blog writer would need to receive enough to cover ~£12ph to be covering wage cost alone; how many of the millions of blogs ever made do that?)?
>I don't know--GP post has a valid point of view even if people disagree. I also feel it takes a bit of nerve to think that you should be financially compensated for writing your personal blog, no matter how big your audience is or how much time or effort you devote to it.
Well, feeling that people should just write stuff that you read and find valuable on their blogs for free, despite the effort it takes them to write them, takes even more nerve.
It also shows that you believe blogging is something unique that should be free for all, and not merely a new outlet for the act of writing, which, can be either a hobby or a job like any other.
Because personal blogging can also be a business for some?
It's not like every personal blog does it -- the huge majority are their for free, with no ads or anything. But if you devote the time and effort, and have an audience, why not?
It's like saying pro dancers shouldn't exist, because tons of people also dance for free.