How Much Is My Blog Worth?

Getting a Neck Tattoo for Me.

When I started blogging in the mid–1990s, like many other new bloggers, I hoped AOL would buy my domain name and make me rich. Or at least help pay off some of the student loans I was accruing. Didn’t happen. If you don’t remember the “How Much is Your Blog Worth” javascript widget with George Washington’s face on it and your blog’s monetary value, calculated on the purchase price of a famous web network by AOL, you really missed out. If tag clouds were the mullet of the Internet, “How Much is My Blog Worth” was the neck tattoo.

Sometime last year, I realized my film blog–The Stop Button–would be turning ten. Over the years, it has had both its neck tattoo and its mullet. I got the tattoo removed early on (relatively) but I just cut off the mullet in the last couple years. And not because mullets aren’t stylish on the Internet (a mullet is always stylish), but because I didn’t like how the cloud worked.

The cloud showed the most tagged principals on the site. And it was a bunch of guys who worked on Warner Bros. cartoons, because I had watched a bunch of those. It was accurate, but I didn’t like how the tag cloud was working. Because I didn’t like how the site was working. So I cut off the mullet and started thinking about a good twenty-first century haircut.

It is, after all, the year of hoverboards, flying cars and power shoelaces.

I tried a lot with The Stop Button’s tenth anniversary (shortened to #TSB10, because I intended on using Twitter on the backend to make it easier to do). Some things I wish had worked out did not. Others I did not expect–the video essays–have become a lot of fun to work on. But I could not figure out how to make the site work as a whole.

Then I came up with Lists. Born in the really strange idea of putting a bunch of lists on the site, Stop Button Lists is instead exactly what the site needs after ten years of changes. The neck tattoo, after all, wasn’t the only thing to go over the years.

I wanted something flexible; possibly scalable, definitely flexible. I’ve spent a lot of time steering the site without actually looking at a map.

Lists started last Thursday. The post discussed a top ten film list from thirty-five years ago, this week post will look at home video releases; those same films will be discussed in a different context in a coming post–see what I mean by flexible?

The idea is to look at different containers and how their contents relate to both the container and the other entries. The first week’s list was created by a single person, the second week’s list came from LaserDisc release dates. Containers can made in many different ways. If I still had those old tag clouds around, they’d be an interesting container to look at since I unintentionally created the list. Or at least passively created it.

For my next post to Lists, I thought about doing an entirely different kind of container. I wanted to look at the most successful movie marketing campaigns and talk about those films. However, with the exception of an “AdWeek” article I couldn’t motivate myself to read, most such lists appear not on film or business sites, but on desperate-for-profit clickbait nonsense sites.

On WhatCulture, which pays its authors based on pageviews (but nothing upfront), I found two lists with the same title. “Ten Best Marketed Movies.” Two different authors, two months apart. I went with the list where I’d seen seventy percent of the films. And I wrote a post about the list.

Try as I might not to attack the bad choices, there was nowhere else to go with it. The list’s creator wasn’t interested in a conversation about the effectiveness of movie marketing, he wanted to get paid. He didn’t see a penny until he got a thousand hits or whatever.

I’m not a stranger to figuring out what will, based on available data, get the best Google results. I do it a little bit with the tags on the site now, trying to conform to existing Google keywords. So I’m not above being mercenary, I just try not to be intrusive with it.

And this list is intrusive. It plays its reader, who’s not just getting played for reading the article, but giving the hits–clicking between each photo to get to the next part of the post. Just reading it requires, through UI, a lot of commitment.

So the list has to be worth it. Either to enrage or to validate.

Once I got through a draft of the post, I couldn’t forgive the lack of research on the list. Analysis would actually be interesting, looking at a bunch of different factors. But WhatCulture isn’t about providing brief scholarly posts, it’s about getting hits.

I pruned the list in my first draft–a la George Carlin and the Ten Commandments–and even planned on doing something similar here. I wanted to look at why the movies got cut. But, really, there isn’t a point to it. It’s a pointless list.

But I just spent some time talking about it, this piece of “should’ve been” ephemera on the Internet. Something meant to distract someone from the ads on the side of the page enough they keep looking at it and those ads keep displaying. There’s a point to all things, if one finds the right angle. The right context to discuss them.

And Context Carbons is about finding those angles.