I have a small confession: sometimes I hate this planet.
Well, not the planet itself. Come on, I’m a travel fanatic. I’d love to see as much of the planet as possible before I die.* But the thing I hate is that sometimes this planet seems like it’s only here to promote product placement. Everywhere you’re likely to look, you’ll be inundated with brand names of soft drinks, computers, cell phones, snack foods, automobiles, fast food restaurants, running shoes, and a jillion other household products. Sometimes it feels like the whole world is a commercial. And as the competition gets fiercer, the harder these folks push their products.
It’s a little over-stimulating, to be honest. Everyone has something to promote, something to sell, something to reach an audience with. Something to refer, something to spread word-of-mouth, something to promote in an online ad. Welcome to the new world order.
Writing about travel isn’t much better. Let’s face it, the majority of travel is promoting something. For example, guidebooks promote restaurants, museums, and hotels. Many travel-related news articles provide press for everything from a new airline route to a new travel product. Press trips, highly coveted by most writers, exist with the hope that the writers will write positively about the product, service, or location in question. Even with the utmost integrity in check, something somewhere is getting free press.
And that’s OK, I suppose. It’s the nature of the beast. But nowadays it seems that advertising has taken a massive dose of steroids somewhere along the lines, and now various chunks of advertising fill in the white space on websites like grout with a vengeance.
It’s all a bit much for me. I know I can’t beat ‘em, but I don’t have to join ‘em just yet.
So for the meantime, I’m going to keep the random ads to a minimum. While I love the idea of text-based ads (ads that are generated based on the text in the posts), and I love the idea of rolling around in a pile of money earned from these ads, I’d like to keep the site nice and tidy for you, the reader.
(You might see some of these ads from time to time in order to keep my account up-to-date with the text-ad people; I have opened an account so that I can earn some modest income by posting my writing on other websites who –do- feature text ads as a method of payment.)
Now, I’m just like a million bloggers out there who wants to market a blog, promote services, and make a little money. So I, like everyone else with a little amount of initiative, do my best to get my name out there. Ideally, I’d love to make my living solely by writing posts on a regular basis.
*June 12, 2053, late afternoon during an explosion in a cheese warehouse (predicted)
Updated 5/27/08