Hamas War

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Are "Suckers" and "Bloggers" Synonyms?

Last night, at the Elitzur Evening at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center, another blogger and I were asked why we weren't making big money like the Huffington Post sale to AOL.
There have been reports in The New York Times and elsewhere that Facebook is now valued at $50 billion, and The Wall Street Journal reported that Twitter had been in low-level talks with both Google and Facebook, with some estimates putting the value of the company at $10 billion. Tumblr, the short-form blogging service, is storming along a similar, if more demure path, while Quora, a site built on user-generated questions and answers, seems to be on its way. And at the beginning of last week, The Huffington Post agreed to be sold for $315 million to AOL.
The funny thing about all these frothy millions and billions piling up? Most of the value was created by people working free. (Emphasis mine)
We spend hours getting our messages across every day, and at most we receive virtual recognition.  I do try to limit my investment by only using free internet services, which does have a downside at times.  There's a limit to even my foolishness.  I'm not that easy a mark, at least that's what I keep telling myself.

I blog on blogger/google/gmail; the slashes are to indicate that they're all the same company.  Some people are getting very rich, but the money doesn't trickle down this far to this very principled blogger in her unheated den in the holy city of Shiloh.  A big advantage of my blogging is that now I can control which of my words get presented to the world, unlike the pre-blog times when journalists would spend hours or even days with me and then publish at most a few of my words, sometimes so distorted or dismissive I would wonder why I had agreed to host them, feed them and sometimes even allow them to sleep over.

Recently I helped a neighbor start a blog.  She was very receptive to the principle that it shouldn't cost her any money.  I'll never forget all the help/content I gave to someone else who had always looked down on what he considered inferior, freebie services.  He paid some internet company to "host" his blog/site, which really was a fantastic one, but when the money gave out, it disappeared, the downside of virtual.  Bli eyin haraa, not to tempt the "evil eye," but free blogger is a better investment.  At least my blog still exists, and blogger updates its services quite frequently.

Would people pay me if I put one of those paypal links begging for funds on my blogs?  Or would I really get money from the ads google would love to have on my blogs?  I'm about to take off the webads logo, because the company seems to be inactive now.  I used to give the small payments received to our local synagogue as a donation.

Back to my original question:
Are "Suckers" and "Bloggers" Synonyms?

2 comments:

Hadassa said...

Shalom!
Here's a relevant link: http://blog.mises.org/15689/is-the-price-of-content-approaching-zero/ "Robert" has another link to an analysis.

Batya said...

Interesting, thanks; it's based on the same article.