I've been wrestling with why I feel so uncomfortable with this move. About the best analogy I've come up with: this feels like I've been using a maid service for years. They've done a reliable job keeping my place clean for when I have guests over. They decide that it is time to raise their rates, but rather than come directly to me to negotiate a pay increase they decide that they can just sell billfold space in my house when they clean.
It seems like a violation of a social contract, because my blog is my house and I don't intend to have advertising there, even if I did I'm too small of a fry to make any money that way.
I realize that no one wants to raise rates, and this sort of business model if I had been given the choice up front I'd probably be fine with... If I wasn't also growing increasingly weary of the race-to-bottom-feeding, increasingly toxic ad markets, which has been a concern worrying me the last few months and I haven't had any good ideas, but I certainly don't want my blog participating in that for what tiny bit that is worth.
Read the blog post and it does sound more reasonable that they mention planning to talk to existing sites about the change before introducing ads everywhere, which weakens my analogy a bit. Still doesn't assuage my secondary concerns.
I've been wrestling with why I feel so uncomfortable with this move. About the best analogy I've come up with: this feels like I've been using a maid service for years. They've done a reliable job keeping my place clean for when I have guests over. They decide that it is time to raise their rates, but rather than come directly to me to negotiate a pay increase they decide that they can just sell billfold space in my house when they clean.
It seems like a violation of a social contract, because my blog is my house and I don't intend to have advertising there, even if I did I'm too small of a fry to make any money that way.
I realize that no one wants to raise rates, and this sort of business model if I had been given the choice up front I'd probably be fine with... If I wasn't also growing increasingly weary of the race-to-bottom-feeding, increasingly toxic ad markets, which has been a concern worrying me the last few months and I haven't had any good ideas, but I certainly don't want my blog participating in that for what tiny bit that is worth.