Advertising is the Cornerstone of Democracy

Disclaimer: I watched 22 hours of Mad Men this Summer.

To those of you who don't advertise on your blog, I understand: You are rich and don't need the money. Seriously, probably not worth your time and effort. You need serious traffic to get a return on the time investment it takes to set up and maintain advertising on your blog.

However, the time effort isn't that big. Once you have entered the code into you into you blog template and set up you account for direct deposit, you can basically forget about it (assuming you don't change your blog template or your bank account).

Rather than discuss how many children you have saved with your Unicef donations thanks the money you have earned (tax free if you deduct your costs such as Internet access), lets ponder the advertising dollars you have redirected. Unless you blog is about pets, you are presumably redirecting adverting away from things like newspapers. Newspapers are dying you know (as are the paper mills that supply them). Thousands of people are losing their jobs because of you. Think about it.

Worse, with newspapers dead, who will be out there making sure the Sarah Palins of this world aren't making stuff up? Think about it.

On the other hand, if you don't advertise on your blog, perhaps you are stealing eyeballs away from newspapers. Making newspaper advertising less effective and making billboards and urinal posters that much more valuable. For example, have you noticed that Bell and Rogers both use billboard and transit advertising, a lot!

Anyway, I've been using Twitter over the last few months (advertising free), so this post has gone way beyond my attention span. So please complete this post by entering coherent comments.

Thanks,

Altavistagoogle.