Tag Archives: Advertisements

Blog Advertising Sucks (Part Two)

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Hey y’all! How have you been doing? As you probably (haven’t) noticed, I’ve seemingly dropped off the face of the earth during the last three weeks not having done anything on this blog or any of the others. There’s a lot to say about these past three weeks — alcoholism, binge drinking, stress, being on vacation for a month, and somehow being torn between trying to ‘relax’ and being productive — but I don’t really know what it is I want to say about anything yet. There are various ideas for a handful of blog posts that all seem to intertwine into a web that I cannot separate into clean, isolated, and easy to tackle subjects. It’s currently a jumbled mess but it’s a mess I hope to untangle in the near future.

(Possible future post ideas mostly for my own benefit: Fuck Facebook Part 924: my ‘Scorched Earth’ William Tecumseh Sherman Approach, The Struggle of Being Consistent on Social Media/Blogging, A Lesson from Vacation: Maybe I Can Relax? or Am I Too Goal-Oriented?, The Layers of Onions (in Regards to Therapy) Suck, and Airplane Crashes Suck.)

Simple posts are a nice way to ease back into writing, and holy shit, I have something to write about that is easy! I wrote a post about blog advertising over a month ago saying I began running ads through WordPress WordAds. Basically, ads are displayed here and I get money for them. Yay! Right? Probably not. In that post, I was skeptical of any money I’d actually make because from what I’ve read you need a fuckton of views and ad clicks to earn anything notable. Basically I knew I wouldn’t get shit for the ads, didn’t get my hopes up (luckily), and it was more of an experiment than anything else. How much money could my tiny and nearly insignificant hobby blog rake in over a month?

Yesterday I logged into WordPress, clicked the “Earn” menu, and saw this:

BIG, BIG MONEH!

Four cents?! Well, it’s money, but…how many ‘ads served’ was that even from? As you can see: 6,391. I feel a bit better about that, but am also wondering how many fucking people on this 1,000 views/month blog somehow clicked the Duck Duck Go ads 6,000 times. The more likely scenario is that I don’t understand what the 6,391 ‘ads served’ actually means. I’m hopelessly ignorant to anything blogging and this is just another fissure to show my total lack of knowledge for the whole endeavor.

But as I’ve said about my paltry Amazon self-publishing earnings (no link provided: I can’t find the post I’m referring to here…), it’s nice knowing the things you’ve written actually earn real money, even if it is an amount you’d casually dump into the “give a penny, take a penny” jar at the local gas station without thought. I’m not exactly sure what I’ll do about this; running ads seems really tacky and I’m torn between keeping this blog as ‘artistically pure’ as possible (whatever that means) but also still enjoying the dream of making a career out of writing in whatever form of writing that may take, be it blogging or publishing or freelancing or whatever. Honestly, I’ll probably give it a few more months and see if the money improves (hint: it probably won’t) as more of a blogging science experiment more than anything to actually get rich off of.

So after my (continuing) alcoholic hiatus: thanks for sticking around. Hopefully I can get my writing shit together and be a bit more proficient in the near future.

Check out my Instagram where I post pointless artistic pics every whenever I get around to it.

Or my other blog where I sometimes post stories.

Or Wattpad where I have a Morrowind fanfic ongoing.

Or my Facebook page where I don’t do much of anything at all, but I do appreciate more followers.

The Illinois Primary Sucks

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(This is a dreaded “political post” but not about the typical dumpster fire. Maybe it won’t be so bad.)

The Illinois primary for Governor is Tuesday. This post is a little late in coming but with a deadline comes desperation which brings motivation. The primaries should mostly be focused on the democrats because our governor is a republican (Brucey Rauner) and will certainly win his primary. What’s more important is Brucey is pretty well hated in our state and we will (almost certainly) elect a democrat for our next governor. In effect we’re choosing our next governor based on whoever wins the democratic primary Tuesday. So who’s running?

We have three “big candidates”: J.B. Pritzker, Chris Kennedy, and Daniel Bliss. Surprisingly (really unsurprisingly), I know who’s going to win. It’ll be J.B. Pritzker. Why? Because he’s rich as fuck that’s why.

Here’s a link that, while a bit older, describes what these people make or are worth. I know they’re different numbers but you get an idea about how much money they have to throw around. Kennedy made over a million dollars last year, and J.B. made about 9 million dollars and is worth over 3 billion dollars apparently. Biss, along with his wife, made $55,000. Wow. Biss is poor as fuck.

J.B. will win because if you have three billion dollars you can spam ads everywhere. Every few days I get a goddamn Pritzker ad in the mail (which immediately goes into the trash), and I see other ads for the bastard everywhere. Facebook spams me with Pritzker ads and the TV yells Pritzker ads at me. That’s all anyone in Illinois hears about is Jay Bee Pritzker. It’s exhausting.

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A wild Pritzker ad appears! Seriously, these things are like Zubats in caves.

Politicians don’t win elections based on how decent their policies and ideas are. They’re successful based on how well they can get their names out to the masses. It’s one big, stupid popularity contest. You could have the best candidate ever but if they don’t have money to throw around they don’t have any chance of winning. It’s sad, but that’s how it is. Politics Suck.

You could also blame the voters. People walk into the booths on primary day with little idea of anything. They vote for the name that is most familiar. How many ill-informed voters will stroll in to vote only knowing there’s some democrat named J.B. running? Enough of them to guarantee victory for the guy. JB? Hmm. I’ve heard of him. And his name sounds cool! *Fills in bubble*

I’m sick of rich people being in politics. I get that “business people” are seen as good candidates for office, but damn, can we quit having billionaires running for things? Having a fuckton of money doesn’t show you can successfully represent people; it just means you have a fuckton of money. So say hello to our future governor of Illinois J.B. Pritzker. He might be qualified and he might be a good governor and you should notice that I haven’t mentioned anything about specific policies. This is mostly because policies don’t matter and that’s not why he’ll win. He’ll win because he’s rich as fuck and can buy advertisements. That’s it. Once again, Politics Suck.