SpikeTheLobsterBad Blog! Bad!
February 1st 2009 02:07
Modern art or bad blog?
There's been a flurry of activity this week over at Bloggercises here on Orble. It all started when I posted a whine about AdSense revenue - or rather, a badly enunciated remark about the tiny revenue we small-time bloggers see from it! Since then, Mr Bloggercise (that'd be Chris) has responded and continued to look into the idea of blogging for a living. The posts make for excellent reading, whether you're a serious online writer or just keeping a little journal.
Personally, I'm somewhere between the two extremes. Although I agree with virtually everything he says, I disagree with one statement on his current post: that if you don't know whether you're a talented writer, you're not one. I feel it's very difficult to gauge one's own abilities without some kind of input from more experienced people. Modesty also has a lot of bearing on the matter.
Anyway, back to the subject of this post. Looking at other blogs is, of course, an important part of the learning process for all writers and bloggers. Spotting good and bad content - and working out why it's good or bad - allow us to learn from other people's experience and mistakes. Every day, as part of my exercise of keeping my other blog fairly high on the LinkReferral directory, I peruse thirty other sites. The image above is not some kind of cubist art, but a screenshot from one of those, with the identifying portions masked.
Why do I say this is a bad blog?
The blue section at the top is the page title. That's normal. But look at the rest. Imagine arriving on this blog: everything masked in red is an advert. The grey part at the bottom is the actual content - basically only a title and a line of text is visible on a normal screen (at 1024x768, not some crazily high resolution). A visitor is immediately blasted with about 80% of the page's text space as advertising. The screen must be scrolled to even see a part of the day's post - it's 'monetizing' gone to an extreme. To me, this screams that the author places a much higher priority on their revenue than on their content.
Call me a cynic, but it seems to me that the site owner would be better off having some content on that first page. At least there'd be something to keep the visitors interested: keep your ads visible but discreet, or you'll scare off the casual reader.
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Comment by Chris Champion
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It was a contentious sentence, and unnecessary in the context of the post. But I firmly believe it, and I included it because it addresses the perennial blog writing quality issue which is a recurring theme on Bloggercises.