Or, Not Everything’s For Sale

As you might have noticed, this blog is not heavily studded with ads. Oh, sure, I have some links over in my left sidebar for Amazon, my CafePress T-shirt shop, and space music by GEODESIUM. I put them there to encourage people to buy stuff through my site when they go to Amazon, or if they need cool, space-themed gifts for themselves or others.  In return, Amazon.com gives me a few gold-pressed latinum nuggets each time somebody clicks through and buys stuff, but those nuggets are not added to the price you pay. They’re just part of Amazon’s cost of “renting” my web page for a link to theirs.  That makes me a sort of sales agent, a conduit, for which I get a little reward.  CafePress gives me a portion of T-shirt sales, and of course, I’m married to the guy who does those lovely GEODESIUM albums, so I get a reward there, too (although not gold-pressed latinum).

Those little rewards add up and I use them to pay the bills to my ISP.  So, if you’re inclined to buy something anyway, do us both a favor and use those clickables to do it.

I also have an online store, accessible up there where it says “The Spacewriter’s Store.” It’s a place where I can  recommend books and products that I personally have read or used, or that I’d like to read or use.  It’s amazingly easy for me to add stuff to the online store, which is what attracted me to it in the first place. I don’t have a lot of time to spend futzing around with code.

Astute observers will notice that I have another “gift shop” listed on my main web page, and it’s an outgrowth of a online “library” I once started. It also has links to specific products on Amazon. I tried to make those part of a review process to help readers make some choices in their buying.

So, I was giving some thought to “monetizing” my blog even more, and I just can’t seem to bring myself to festoon it with more ads. I think most readers appreciate that. I know that I can’t stand looking at blogs that have more ads than copy.  I do have an account with Adsense, but I’ve mainly used that to put ads on my other web pages. I used to have revolving ads on my other blog, and every day — EVERY day — I’d have to go in and weed out some ads that were just not appropriate for the content I write about. No, they weren’t for pr0N or anything like that. Usually they were for what my friend Phil Plait likes to call “woo-woo” theories of the universe written up in books that are in bad need of editorial oversight. And, I got a little tired of having ads pop up from anti-science zealots; they looked really stupid on a site about science, and worse yet, I felt responsible about those ads.

So, for the time being, I have no Adsense ads on this page.  And, maybe that’s okay.  Not everything has to be monetized up the wazoo.