Bret Pimentel had an interesting post this morning:
I give my content away, directly to the reader, for free at my own website, but I retain the copyright. If someone wants to read it, they visit my site or retrieve one of my feeds. I make an astonishingly tiny amount of money from minimal advertising, the occasional affiliate product link, and a few donations. But the content remains under my control, in a single canonical copy.
Basically, some big named woodwind company. I suspect it was The Woodwind and The Brasswind, wanted to use some of his articles on their site in exchange for “increasing your website traffic” or something. He said no. Good for him.
I’ve been running a website since before 1999, I believe I started it in 1998 but archive.org only has data from 1999. Oh well. The point is, this is a BS thing. The “increasing website traffic”. If you got mentioned on Daringfireball.net, or some MAJOR site on the internet, yeah, you’ll see an increase in your traffic……for a day or two. Then….nothing. In the mean time, whomever wanted your articles and stuff has the content, and perhaps a Google search will have them come up first for it rather than your site.
In terms of money, there really isn’t a lot of money to be made with Ads. The THREE Ads I have on Jazz-Sax generate maybe $1 a day. Maybe. Sometimes more, sometimes less. That translates into maybe $100 from Google every 3 months. I don’t even know if that pays the electricity for the computer running it, or really covers the internet costs.
I think the most annoying thing is that, although the content here is FREE, you need to register. Why? Because I don’t want some guy in Russia hard linking to the files from his site. Or actually taking the files and putting them on their own servers. David Valdez, from the davidvaldez.blogspot.com blog was doing this with some of my files and other people’s files. Not sure if he still is. I can sorta see the reasoning….perhaps he’s not sure if my or other people’s sites will be up in 6 months. 6 years. Whatever. So he thinks the stuff is valuable enough to take and put on his site. Fair enough. Except he didn’t ask. None of these people ask. Of course my answer is going to be NO, you cannot host files/articles on your site. You can, like Bret Pimentel tried to do, offer to put a summary and then link to my site for the actual content. I think that is fair.
I also absolutely hate….HATE….people who do “I see you have X on your site, can you send it to me”. NO! It’s there. Figure it out.
I’m going now to drive some kids off my lawn…..