- Start a weblog.
- Add Google AdSense ads.
- Make money.
Matt explains why targeting is crucial for this to work. That's why this site
made $28 in the last three months, and
PVRblogs makes enough to buy an aeron chair each month. It bothers me to think that advertising is going to be the way to pay people for their work on the web. I thought we could do better than television.
Traditional book publishers should also read this article. It could be more lucrative for an author to keep a weblog on a subject than write a book on a subject.
I still say there needs to be another compensation model for things like very personal writing, a site about reducing your involvement in consumer culture, or artistic expression such as Patrick's e-sheep comics site or Heather and Dean's daily photo sites. (Or those things will tend to remain uncompensated).
We might also want to make a distinction between push advertising like an AdSense text ad or a banner and pull advertising like "here's the book jacket of what I'm reading, and if you click on it you can read more about it at Amazon and buy it if you feel like it or not".