“Selling Out” to AdSense and Amazon Associates

November 03 2004 – 12:37am

You may have noticed that I now have Google Adsense ads on my site, and, of course, I have an Amazon Associates account. Of course, the objective of this blog is not to make money. There are certainly more efficient ways to do so. I want to organize my thoughts, share them with others, exchange thoughts with others, contribute to adding semantic value to the web, and hopefully have my thoughts read again many years from now.

That said, I worry myself sometimes when I make decisions that may not provide the best and most honest content possible, in order to have the opportunity to chip a couple cents out of my hosting costs. The main place this may happen, is that when I am talking about a movie that isn’t available on DVD yet, I link to IMDB, which I consider to be the best resource on movies, however, if the movie is out on DVD, I link to that item on Amazon, through my associates account.

I promise, this is as greedy as I will get. Now if I overnight happen to become an expert on real estate (“real estate” probably being a pretty high-paying AdWord string), then you know I’ve lost it.

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I hope you find my remarks on books, music, technology and whatever other artifacts that may be linked to on Amazon as relevant and interesting as my comments on anything else. As a critic of Affluenza, I couldn’t, in good conscience, push products I didn’t feel were useful. I also hope that the contents of the Google ads are relevant and unintrusive.