Google tells me that I can make money from my blog. That sounds great. Isn't that what every writer wants after all—to have a way to earn a living from writing?
There is of course a catch. After all, there is no such thing as a free lunch, as someone said sometime and everyone else repeats until it becomes a ridiculous cliche. But I digress. The catch is this: in order to earn money I have to allow ads to display on this blog.
Is that a significant problem? In our culture we see ads everywhere. Every time you read a magazine, do an Internet search, look on Facebook, listen to the radio, and so on, you find yourself unwillingly—or willingly—subjected to some version of this-is-the-best-thing-ever-and-you-should-totally-spend-your-hardearned-money-on-it. We experience these things so much we mostly ignore them, unless they are funny in which case we laugh and later can't remember what was being sold to us.
Probably if I had told Google yes I wanted ads on this blog so I could make money from it, you would not even have noticed. You would have assumed that Google had yet again found a way to make money to keep a free service going. Yet I prefer to be more honest.
Maybe I am being dramatic, but it seems to come down to whether I want to buy into commercial society. I can give in to the advertising industry's ubiquitous presence and promote it because of what I get from the exchange, or I can stand on a lone island lifting up the flag of unspoiled artistic endeavor and high ideals, watching as I float farther from the mainland....
Which would you do?
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