Ethics and Monetized Blogging
I just had one of those moments, where I decide that it is time to write a post even though I don’t really feel inspired or motivated.
The first topic that came to mind was the ethics of monetized blogging. I typed those three words into Google and I was a bit disappointed to find that this blog was the top hit. It seems like this is a topic that is not being widely discussed in an open and frank way.
The number two hit was from thepaperbull.com. The author of that blog had an issue with the what he perceived as unethical behavior by John Chow. I don’t know if John implemented his plan to charge a subscription for removing the no follow tag from links in his comment section or not. In my mind this seems like a poorly thought out way to get money from your readers. I removed the no follow tags from my personal blog when the practice was being promoted as a good neighbor kind of gesture. I have not implemented ‘do follow’ on Slamboard.
Farther down the page is DoshDosh. Her post was a review of a presentation by a famous Adsense success story guy. Adsense revenue is the money that site owners make when readers click the ads by Google. These ads are meant to be contextual. Google uses keywords present on your blog to decide whose ad to place on your page. The subject of ethics comes into play with this because site owners do not have any editorial control over these ads. The author of DoshDosh felt that she would be a hypocrite if, for example, she was writing a post criticizing MLM schemes and her post triggered a contextual ad for an MLM scheme. The gist of the post is that she wants editorial control and is putting that ahead of the small revenue offered by adsense. This post is about six months old and it now features Adsense ads.
…running Adsense on sites with little content (proxies, parked domains etc.) or weakly branded sites with a very general and wide range of topics means a lesser risk of going against your site’s mission statement or content focus.
I find that here is a real class distinction among bloggers. The people who build a reputation and a following with a personality and/or content that is somehow engaging to a vast number of people have the luxury of selling out in relatively unnoticeable ways and earning thousands of dollars. Other people are adding their stories to the millions and they take advantage of any monetizing scheme that works and quite a few that don’t. Labeling any particular practice in the blogosphere as unethical is typically a judgment call, because there is no code of ethics that is widely recognized (please correct me if I am wrong).
