* About Monetization and Ranting (Just discount this rant like any other Boxing Day Special~)

I was surfing my Bloglines yesterday (Christmas day) and catching up on the ones that I haven’t read in a long while .. and I found myself reading an interesting blog entry. The author was looking back on 2006 and had mentioned that s/he was proud to finally break the 500 unique page views per day, and the unique visitors were averaging about 300 per day. Sounds good to me! The author continued, and was ‘proud’ that s/he had avoided temptation and have never used any ‘google ads’ or any ‘ads whatsoever’ on the blog and .. in a sly way, implied that people or bloggers who do have google ads or other monetization on their blogs were evil and sneaky and you should avoid reading them.

This author left his/her public statscounter.com results to prove his/her claims of the traffic and I was looking at it a little closely.

Yes, this blog was averaging about 450-550 page views a day, and the unique daily visitors seemed to be hovering between 275-350 unique visitors .. but this author neglected to point out one other piece of information .. that the RETURNING VISITORS were averaging between 200-250 every day!

According to my math .. that’s about 80% of your unique visitors returning back to you everyday .. so, it’s not like you are getting about 300 new visitors each day.

Listen .. I’m not knocking this person’s site, and 250 returning visitors is something that even I would like to achieve – but, perhaps .. just perhaps .. in this particular case .. monetization would NEVER work anyway .. seeing that it’s the same people that came back over and over each day .. friends and family will not get you rich by clicking on your ads. And, if that’s your reason to not have ads (because you wouldn’t be able to make any money from it anyway) … why are you putting down other people’s attempts to recoup financially some of their expenses?

By the way .. that person’s site was just about movie reviews that this person would write about – after watching movies on this person’s T.V.

Sorry for this rant .. I don’t care what people do or what they say about me (sticks or stones theory) but, just because it’s the holidays .. doesn’t mean you have to act more holier than me. I hope my ads and affiliate links and monetization attempts around my blogs are not intrusive, and if they are – PLEASE! feel free to mention that in my comments at any time .. But honestly, I’ll probably continue to have them and I do plan to try different techniques at various times to see what works for me and what doesn’t. And, if that’s your reason for you to decide to unsubscribe to my RSS feed .. that’s your choice.

i.m.h.o. h.y.d.m.

* And, Speaking of Rants .. in a network kind-of-way …

Does anybody else find it odd to see a lot of b5media blogs joining the Glam Network? … I mean, more power to them I guess.

It’s obvious some code on the sidebars and blogs are members. According to their Join Our Network page ..

The Glam Blog Network is the premier network of editorially independent bloggers who possess unique points of view about fashion and style. Glam blogs cover a variety of topics, including apparel, accessories, beauty, trends, industry news, sales, and more!

No offense .. but .. how does Dale Chavez and the Green Posse blog in the sports channel fit that? I mean, I can see blogs from the beauty and fashion channels, or promotion of “women’s lifestyle” bloggers ..

>> Okay – that wasn’t a rant .. just curiousity. I really don’t expect any answers and it’s really not any of my business anyway.