Funny is celebrating the Fourth of July by hosting the Totally Money Carnival. Today among other things I’ll be spending some time viewing the posts that have already come in. Submissions are open until 6:00 p.m. Sunday, Central Daylight Time. So be sure to submit your best and totally money story through this handy form.
Urkl. The workload during the present “vacation” has been so outrageous I haven’t sent any of my own pieces to carnivals for several weeks. Nor, for that matter, have I written much that could reasonably be accused of falling into the “personal finance” category. 🙄
Worse, I haven’t had time to read many of my favorite blogs, or comment on them. Blogger’s new scheme to force readers to create their own Blogger site before they’ll let you comment has discouraged me from reading and commenting on blogs in general, mostly because many of my favorite sites are on Blogger. This started at Frugal Scholar, who’s adventuring in Nantes just now. Be sure to keep an eye on that site for updates.
At a Gai Shan Life, where Blogger also has decided to block comments from non-members, Revanche pauses in her wedding plans to reflect on the cost of adopting a dog—a cost she detailed a few days ago. LOL! Dogs do cost a ton of money. Sounds like Revanche and PiC’s new critter, though, is worth it.
Donna Freedman has posted a number of interesting pieces since last I visited my friends. Here it is, almost the Fourth of July, and she’s already thinking about Christmas giving. Possibly this is a way of deflecting thoughts about the death of a beloved aunt and that lifelong loneliness we suffer when we lose our loved ones.
At the Digerati Life, SVB compares public school and private school costs. Public schools in California are getting expensive, what with taxpayer revolts and the general collapse of the body politick there.
Hm. Speaking of home-schooling and other parental eccentricities, Five-Cent Nickel reports that the new credit-card law will make it difficult or impossible for a stay-at-home parent to get a credit card in her or his name. As some readers there comment, it also will put abused women at even more risk and make it harder for them to escape their abusers. Thank you very much, O infinitely wise leaders!
Free Money Finance contemplates the possibility of living the royal life on $900 a month. Would you be willing to do what it takes to make that possible?
And speaking of parenting, Evan recently celebrated his first Father’s Day. As a dad, that is.
Mrs. Accountability ponders the art and science of filling out business deposit slips, and along the way drops a couple of amazing factoids about the strange things people will do.
Brip-Blap remarks that he feels he’s about plateaued out with blogging about PF issues. Sustainable living is beginning to interest him more…check out the cool lawn chairs he rescued and fixed up.
Check out the amazingly ambitious Crystal’s new blog—as if Budgeting in the Fun Stuff and several other enterprises weren’t enough, she’s created a new site called (ta da!) How I Make Money Blogging. LOL! Maybe I should start one called “How I Make Money Editing.” 😀
At I Pick Up Pennies, Abigail and Tim are closing in on a smokin’ deal on a house. They’ve been house-hunting for a while in Phoenix’s surprisingly hot low-end market: speculators now believe prices have hit rock-bottom and now are bidding up prices in a new frenzy to get into the rental or fix-&-flip market. And here’s a new refinement of the “you can’t post here unless…” phenomenon: her host thinks I’m still logged in as my WordPress alternative to Blackboard, a site URL I do not care to publicize. Even though I’m actually logged off of WordPress.com, it insists that I have to sign up for something called “Intense Debate” to avoid posting under my course’s URL. Jeez!
Maybe I’m too cranky about this. But you know, it’s like being asked to carry around yet another “member” card to get a fair price on goods at grocery stores. My wallet is so stuffed with those things I break my fingernails on them trying to get out a credit card. I’ve stopped shopping in stores that demand that I fill out yet another form with personal information that’s none of their business. There’s a limit. And I’m at my limit for filling out forms for online sites, too. No more of that!
Welp, speaking of making money editing, now that I’ve finally shoveled the last big project off my desk, I’ve gotta spend half the day catching up with the bookkeeping and paying bills. So…it’s off to see the Wizard (the online QuickBooks wizard, that is).
So the new strategy to stand upwhile working in front of a computer is now under way. It occurred to me to wonder if standing and thinking might burn more calories than sitting and thinking. Here’s what the Web says:
So. Each day one restrains oneself from quaffing one’s favorite brew and stands up in front of the computer for eight hours, one deletes 233 calories from one’s daily pack-it-in activities. Put another way, one beer = 1 hour and 55 minutes of standing on one’s feet.
On the other hand, one bourbon-&-water costs you only 52 minutes of labor in front of the computer.
Interesting. I don’t expect we’re supposed to be looking at it that way, are we?
Cassie the Corgi fell in the drink this afternoon. Squirreling around with the ball, she tumbled right in. And oh! The terror!
This little dog hates water so much that if she sees a sprinkler while we’re walking, she’ll insist on crossing over to the other side of the street. And if you think dogs don’t feel emotions like humans do, you needed to be here to see the look of raw fear in her eyes.
WTF?
Fortunately, she was so close to the edge that all I had to do was reach over, grab a few hairs on her mane, and guide her over to the steps, where she soon found her footing. And then she was a very, very, very disgusted dog.
Naturally, I’d washed the dog towels, having laundered the dog herself not so long ago. Didn’t notice that after I’d put them on the line, they slipped off and fell on the deck. So when I went to retrieve them, they were lying on the planks in a wet heap, useless. Had to press some human towels into service.
And naturally, it’s 6:00 in the evening, and so she’s still going to be wet by bed-time. This animal’s coat is so thick that when she gets soaked to the skin, it takes her six or eight hours to dry out. So I’ll have to find something for her to lay on that will protect the mattress. {sigh}
Knowing how much she hates water and also knowing that she never lets me out of her sight when we’re in the yard, I’ve been lazy about teaching Cassie to paddle over to the steps, where she can get out of the pool by herself. And indeed, when she fell in, she was right under my feet. In fact, for a while there she was giving me the evil eye…I think she thinks I kicked her in there.
When the puppy gets here, she is going to need to know how to get out of the pool. The first thing that’s gonna happen is that little critter is going to tip her right over into the water. In fact, they’ll probably both fall in. So…I’ve got about six weeks in which to teach this dog to swim. We’ll be starting the first thing in the morning.
Then we’ll have to train the pup to swim out, too.
Hm. This may not be a great idea…
Oh, the dog? Never fear. She’s none the worse for wear.
I'll live to eat again! Soooooonnnn!
Before she’d even shaken the last of the water out of her fur and onto the kitchen cabinetry, she was back in business…
Once again we’re reminded of how unhealthy it is for us to spend most of our waking hours seated at a desk or loafing in our favorite easy chair. The latest report tells us a 14-year study showed women participants who spent six or more hours a day sitting down were 40% more likely to croak over prematurely than women who spent the time standing or moving around; men got lucky this time—the sitting male is only 20% more likely to die.
Six hours? Six hours?? Would that I could get off my duff after only six hours! Dunno about you, but between blogging, editing, and grading papers, I spend eight to ten hours a day, every day—that’s seven days a week—sitting in front of a computer. That would be in normal times; get a crunch, and you can revise that figure upward to twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours. Easily.
We’re told, too, that no amount of exercise reverses the damage done by this habit. Holy mackerel. I’m doomed.
This is an issue that’s been nibbling at the periphery of my consciousness for quite some time. It doesn’t take a controlled scientific study to tell you sitting on your duff all day long ain’t natural and cain’t be good for you. For the privilege of loafing in front of a computer exercising my fingers ten to twenty hours a day, I’m paying in pounds. I’m getting fatter and fatter and fatter.
Nothing very abrupt: just a very, very slow but steady accretion of love handles and belly fat and tight, tight jeans.
When your size 12 jeans are too tight, you know you’ve got a problem…
I keep telling myself I’m going to go on a diet, going to set a timer to go off every twenty minutes and make myself get up and stretch or walk around the house, going to take the dog for 30- to 40-minute walks twice a day, going to bicycle every day, going to swim 20 laps every day… Right. Well. Tomorrow, for sure.
All those promises go into the same trash barrel, along with the New Year’s resolutions and the good intentions.
Killer app?
The problem is the computer. It’s like a magnet. I can’t stay away from it, even when I’m not actually working. First thing in the morning, I stumble across the four feet between the bedroom and the office, turn the damn thing on, read the mail, read the Play-Nooz, write a blog post. Now it’s not the first thing in the morning anymore. And now it’s time to get down to work. Fix breakfast, throw down some food for the dog, and head back to the office to start computing for pay. When the work is done, do I get up and move around? Hell, no! I cruise the Web (StumbleUpon is one of my favorite toys), search my favorite news sites for the day’s most lurid stories, read other people’s blogs, comment on other people’s blogs, play Internet games, glance up at the clock…and it’s 11 p.m.! Haven’t had dinner, haven’t fed the dog, and most certainly have walked neither the dog nor me.
The computer is like the family TV of yore. Television was decidedly addictive. I knew people—many people—who ran it all the time, from the instant they rolled out of bed in the morning to the minute they went to bed. Some friends would have a TV in the bedroom, where they deliberately left it running as a lullaby to send themselves off to sleep—they’d put a timer on the thing so it would go off after they were out.
This, obviously, was not healthy. But the computer is worse, because it’s interactive. When a television is blathering, it’s sending its message at you: the noise and pictures are coming out of the set toward you, and your only task is to change the channel now and again. But, unless you’re running a movie or music, a computer demands that you physically be in front of it. To make it do its hypnotic thing, you have to be there feeding messages into it.
When I was a kid, my family had the television going all the time. It was on while we were cleaning house, on while we were cooking, on while we were washing dishes, on while we were ironing (to this day I can’t iron without a TV program to alleviate the boredom), on while we were eating, on while we were reading the papers, on while we were doing our homework, on while we were sewing or knitting or pasting photos in the family album, on while we were playing, on while we were talking (isn’t that quaint? In the olden days, family members conversed with each other). All of which is to say that the TV did not necessarily interfere with physical activity. In fact most of the time we were moving around the house while the boob tube was blathering on.
Okay. Flash forward to 2011. We now have these fundamental facts:
1. I am not gonna give up my computer habit. 2. None of us can give up our computer habit, because it’s now the basis of our lives and social interaction and, heaven help us, our livelihoods. 3. Whatever is to be done about the health effects has to be simple and easy to work into one’s daily routine…and that, I’m afraid, does not mean setting the kitchen timer to interrupt your train of thought every twenty to sixty minutes. 4. There actually is a very simple solution.
Yes. There is a simple solution:Stay off your duff while you’re in front of the computer!
Where does it say that you have to sit down to use your computer? You don’t. You can work on a computer standing up.
Instrument of death?
Before you fall off your well-worn chair laughing at this concept, consider:
Some years ago, I went through a spate of tenacious back pain. It hurt all the time, and it went on for so long I thought it was going to be a life-long problem that would never go away.
After a year or two of this, a friend who was a licensed massage therapist and yoga instructor started giving yoga classes at my house. The women in her group ranged from early middle age to their late 70s, and one gal was so overweight as to be disabled. All of us were beginners. So, as you can imagine, the level of the yoga we were doing wasn’t very strenuous.
I found that after a few weeks of this, the back started to feel a little better. If such mild exercise helped with that very stubborn pain, I figured, there must be other things I could do to fix it. Maybe there was something in my life that was contributing to the pain, and maybe I could change it. My attention turned to my daily habits.
And on inspection, what should I find but…yes! A threadbare desk chair. I realized that then, as now, I was spending uncountable numbers of hours in front of the computer, and as I was sitting there, I was slouching grotesquely, perched on my tailbone with my feet up on the desk and my head stuck forward, staring at the screen. Hour after hour after hour.
The execrable posture and the fact that I sat in the same bad-for-you position most of the day had to have some bearing on the back pain. How many chimpanzees spend their waking hours sprawled in a chair with their feet on their desk and all the weight of their bodies bearing down on their tailbones? This could not be natural.
Well, years before, my then-husband had a law associate who dealt with his own chronic back problems by working at a standing desk. The firm special-ordered him a beautiful standing desk—it was a handsome piece of furniture—and he claimed this kept the back pain under control.
Ordering up a standing desk from Thomas Moser was out of the question. I certainly couldn’t afford to spend upwards of $6,500 just to see if it would work. However, gathering dust out in the garage was an old drafting table we’d bought for our son when he was a little boy. A brief inspection revealed that the top, meant to be used at an angle, could be adjusted to lay flat—at a height that would let you stand up to work on a computer.
So I washed it down, dragged the thing back to my office, put it together, set it up, and voilà! a standing computer table!
With my PC and keyboard perched on this thing, I had to stand up to work or play on the computer. A hard wooden stool, bought very cheap at one of those big linen & household goods stores that are now defunct, served as a perch when my feet started to ache.
And it worked! The back pain went away.
Soooo… Would the circulatory damage also go away (or not start) if a person worked standing up at a computer on a high table?
After the back had been feeling better for a good while, the table exited during a redecorating frenzy. The thing took up a lot of room and really made the office ugly and cramped. So I got rid of it.
Now, I guess, I need to get another one. Amazon has a similar model, only with a fake wood plastic veneer instead of a white plastic veneer. As you can see, these things give you a fairly roomy top—leave the pencil holder off, and you get an expansive flat workspace. The little shelf on the bottom is too flimsy to hold reference works and binders, as intended; but it works nicely as a footrest when you’re perched on a stool. Mine didn’t have that back thing, which would get in the way of your feet, but I’ll bet I could find one just like my old drafting table at an art store.
For the nonce, though, the solution is free: it’s called the kitchen counter. I’m working on a Macbook in the kitchen instead of on the aged iMac. In some ways, this is an improvement: the iMac is so old it won’t take Snow Leopard, and so I can’t load Lion into it, either. It runs at the speed of a galloping snail, which is one reason I pass so many hours in front of the computer: much of that time is spent watching the computer grind away…and grinding my teeth as it grinds its silicon innards. The MacBook runs like a rocket, by comparison.
Yesterday I read 60 pages of a new client’s copy—about five or six hours of work—while standing at the kitchen counter.
Sounds awful, doesn’t it? But not only wasn’t it awful, it had these salubrious effects:
• Forthwith I found that because I was standing up, I was inclined to take occasional breaks for short yoga exercises.
• All the time I was standing there, weight was bearing down on the osteopenic bones in a non-impact way. That’s exactly what your skeleton needs as it ages.
• Before long I realized I could practice balance exercises without interfering with work concentration. Get this: today I balanced on one foot for a full minute without teetering, and in fact quit only out of boredom, not because I fell over. This is huge for old ladies. And for men, gentlemen: you can fall and break your hip, too.
• I got through the work faster. A lot faster. Because I wasn’t loafing in a chair, I was less inclined to wander off to cruise the net, so I stayed on task longer. And because this computer runs faster, much less time was wasted on waiting for things to happen.
• The kitchen got cleaned the first thing in the morning—who wants to look at a dirty dish while they’re working?
This could work.
Eventually, if I decide it’s a healthy thing to make permanent, I’ll have to get a new drafting table for the office. The kitchen counter is a little low for comfort, and it’s inconvenient to have the printer in the other room. For the moment, though, setting the MacBook’s cardboard carrying box under it holds it at the right height.
I think if I’m going to shove a tall table in the office, I’d like to get rid of the old furniture, replace the clunky old desk with a couple of lateral files, and go considerably minimalist. Less junk is better.
Ohhhhh….tired. Head hurts. Totally distracted with work.
Would you believe that ten days ago I was wondering what on earth I would do with myself when I finally finished the heavy lifting involved in rewriting five college courses and mounting them online? Yes. I stood in the house and thought, in passing, “I’m going to be mighty bored.” Also thought, “Maybe I can finally get some sleep.”
That lasted about eight minutes.
Work has just poured into the S-corp. Not that I’m complaining: it means the subcontractors will get paid and I can buy a new computer, which, it’s clear, is much needed.
The iMac is so old and so clogged with data it interferes with productivity. So much time is wasted sitting here watching the damn thing grind away, it’s no wonder I clench my teeth until they break.
Need a new printer/scanner or at least a freestanding, more efficient scanner, too. Add to the fact that my HP all-in-one is even more excruciatingly slow than the iMac, its scanner defaults to color. To upload a check to the credit union, you have to scan in b/w. Reset the scanner to black & white. If you’re not watching closely, it’ll flip back to color. When this happens, you have to go back and s…c…a…n…….t…h…e d…a…m…n…….c…h…e…c…k…….o…v…e…r…….a…g…a…i…n….endlessly.
Which was what happened this morning: turned out of the sack, figured to e-deposit the check that came in yesterday, then take the dog for a walk before it gets hot. This started at 5:30, while my bloodshot eyes were so bleary I could hardly see. Didn’t notice it had blithely defaulted back to 300×300 color, thank you very much, until I went to upload. So had go go through t…h…e…….w…h…o…l…e…….p…r…o…c…e…s…s…….o…v…e…r…….a…g…a…i…n…. UGH!
It’s now 6:30, the sun is up, and I suppose it’s too late to go out into the heat.
Poor little dog.
Oh well. She got walked at 11:00 p.m., which after all was just a few hours ago.
Sent off a set of edits to one client last night for approval and to get a few queries answered; hope to put the finishing touches on that in the next day or two.
Meanwhile two more book projects are in house, one of which I’ll probably have to farm out to a sidekick.
Met with Tina, the numero uno sidekick, yesterday. She’s still earning more waiting tables in her off-hours than the Great Desert University is paying her, despite her boss having engineered a raise through the Chinese gummint.
In a few months, her job with GDU runs out, so she gets a second screwing from them in the form of yet another layoff. Her boss, who jumped at the early retirement offer and now spends most of her time in China, is taking the publication with her and hiring Tina to manage the thing on a contract basis. That’s nice, except it means that in a few months her benefits end, meaning she has to find a way to get her self and the kid insured.
She’s planning to form an S-corporation for her editorial work, too. This would be convenient for The Copyeditor’s Desk, because it would mean I wouldn’t have to issue 1099s to her. Think she’ll find it convenient for herself, too: the S-corp is turning out to be a good way to run a minuscule business.
We were trying to figure out if there was a way I could carry her and maybe one other person as employees so we could buy an insurance plan through Copyeditor’s Desk. Maybe we could get a plan that would allow me to use it as Medigap coverage and her to get herself and the child covered. The problem is, though, our income isn’t yet steady enough to be sure the corporation can pay its share of the premiums reliably.
Well. If the new client who’s supposed to come onboard next month likes our work and turns into a steady thing, that could change. We’d only need one or maybe two such customers to build enough cash flow to allow the corporation to function more…corporately.
Had a bizarre experience yesterday while driving from the press down to meet Tina in Tempe. Scottsdale Road, the most convenient main drag from Scottsdale into the university district, has been under construction forever. They’ve got the curb lane shut down for miles, and in some places they’ve closed the middle lane, too. So I turned west onto McDowell, another six- or eight-lane main drag, to jog over to 64th, which would take me into Tempe via the scenic route through Papago Park. This would evade the lane closures and heavy equipment on Scottsdale, and besides, it’s a nice drive.
I’m cruising along in the left lane (because sooner or later I have to turn left to go south). There’s hardly any traffic to speak of.
All of a sudden this woman in a jeep-like vehicle comes roaring up beside me, opens her window in the 110-degree heat, and starts screaming at me.
I can’t hear her, of course, because my windows are closed and the air-conditioning is running, and I’m not about to open my window.
I have no idea what her problem is, but she is absolutely freaking BERSERK. She’s screaming like a harpy, not watching the road and yelling her head off.
Naturally, the signals turn red Every. Single. Time I drive up to one, and every time we stop she starts to scream again.
Why? I have no clue. I don’t believe I’ve done anything to set her (or anyone else) off. There’s no traffic. I’ve been in the left lane since I turned off Scottsdale Road. There was no one in the lane coming from the east when I entered it, because the light had just turned red in that direction. So I’m sure I didn’t cut her off. I’m not weaving back and forth. I’m driving the limit or slightly faster, and so I’m not holding up traffic in the fast lane. As far as I can tell, she’s crazy in the abstract.
Adding to the weirdness, she’s an expensively groomed, professionally dressed (as far as I could see) young woman. She doesn’t look like a nut case. But she sure is acting like one.
Now she gets out her cell phone and starts taking pictures of my car and me! She drops behind me, apparently snaps a photo of my license plate, then zooms back up beside me, takes her hands off the steering wheel at 40 or 45 mph, leans her head out the window, and shoots a picture of me through the windshield!
Holy mackerel!
Guess I’m just lucky all she had to shoot with was a camera. Most of the nut cases around here carry pistols in their cars.
Now she veers in front of my car and jams on her brakes.
Fortunately, no eastbound traffic is coming in the opposite lanes. I’m already in the left westbound lane, and I spot a car dealership on the south side of the road. Slide into the turn lane and dart into the dealership’s parking lot, figuring at least there’ll be some men hanging around in there. This maneuver gives her the slip, and she continues on down McDowell.
Hung around the parking lot for a few minutes. By the time I got back on the road, she was gone.
This place is just crazy. Just batshit crazy.
An attraction along the scenic route through Papago Park. LOL! The locals have as many holes in their heads as the rocks do.
Well. Bloggers who run adsare small businesses, of course. A couple of ripples in the daily flow of things have, over the past couple of days, led me to ruminate about integrity and ethics, and about how they should direct the course of our little side businesses, including our blogs.
First, a very nice new client recently wandered in through the door. Says he wants someone to edit website copy for a successful small business in the trades. I send my rate sheet, which frames my rates on a per-page basis. He wants to know what I’ll charge by the hour. I say sixty bucks, not an unreasonable amount in the large scheme of things (twenty years ago a friend here was getting $120 an hour for similar work). He, doing business in a large city far, far away where employees’ and independent contractors’ pay is not throttled by right-to-work laws, doesn’t even blink.
So I dive into the project, which is kind of fun. Well, “kind of fun” because it doesn’t entail a lot of technical language or esoteric theory, unlike most of the stuff I do. Mathematical biosciences this is not, nor is it abstruse postmodernist blather. But there’s a fair amount of it, and it needs substantial reorganization, rewriting, and new research & writing. I enjoy this little endeavor over the course of about 22 hours. Eventually I wrap the job and add up my bill, and…
Holy mackerel! At $60 an hour, the tab came to enough for me to buy a condo in the guy’s expensive city. It really did seem out of line, given the relative ease and mild entertainment value of the work.
Okay, it’s true that if I based my fees on how much fun the job is, I’d have to edit Poisoned Pen Press copy for free. But still…there’s a limit.
Seeking a fairer arrangement, I calculated what it would cost the client if I charged my highest page rate—justifiable, I figured, because of the amount of actual writing I did—and came up with an amount that was enough for The Copyeditor’s Desk to buy itself a couple of printer cartridges. Fairly respectable, actually, but not enough to break the bank.
So that was what I ended up billing: about four or five hundred bucks less than the hourly rate would have commanded. But at $60 an hour, the bottom line added up to a figure utterly beyond reason. In an abstract way, it didn’t seem right to charge that much for that kind of work.
Call it the Sanity Discount.
Hard on the heels of that exchange, an ongoing conundrum resurfaced. Some of you probably noticed the recent “sp0ns0r3d post” that went up recently. You may or may not have observed that it also went down.
Funny about Money is getting large enough to attract the attention of various individuals and groups who bill themselves as advertisers. Almost all of them—a good 99.9 percent of them—want me to run paid text links. And they’re willing to pay pretty well for the privilege. I could easily double or triple Funny’s revenues by selling paid text links.
These people and their brokers approach the blogger by saying either that they want to buy ad space on the site or that they are generously offering a guest post, “absolutely free to you.”
Trouble is, doing so eventually puts one afoul of Google’s arcane rules, designed to protect its search engine algorithm. To simplify a complicated story, if Google catches you publishing paid text links (which sooner or later it will), your page rank magically drops to zero.
So, after you’ve worked for months or years to build a respectable page rank, these folks come along and take advantage of it; then when their practices kill your page rank, they of course will abandon you.
That particular aspect is not at issue here, though. What we have at issue is the so-called advertiser’s strategy to evade discovery, which is to produce copy for a post that fits the blogger’s site theme. The paid link is then embedded in the post, in such a way that the link appears to point to something relevant to the post’s subject.
It’s important to understand that paid links are not advertising. They’re a device to suck link juice from a site with a relatively decent page rank into the buyer’s own site, by way of making the other site appear at or near the top of a Google search.
In other words, what looks like a real post is a deceptive device to mount self-serving links whose purpose has nothing to do with the host site’s content. Often it contains a link pointing to some outfit selling a service or product that runs counter to the host site’s very raison d’être. Why, for example, would a personal finance blogger who urges readers to get out of debt, manage money wisely, and avoid loan sharks recommend taking out a payday loan?
Why? To collect a hundred bucks for publishing two words attached to a live do-follow link, that’s why.
Such a post is, in short, advertorial. Actually, it doesn’t even rise to that level, because the articles are not really intended to be read; they exist to carry the links, which exist to use the host’s page rank to jack up the search engine page rank on the link seller’s site. While they’re billed as advertising, they’re actually a form of black-hat SEO.
Well, I started in journalism back in 1979, and over the years I’ve worked for some of the most prominent regional periodicals in my part of the country. Believe it or not, there is such a thing as journalistic ethics, and over the course of 32 years they tend to inhabit your thinking. When I came up, there was a sharp divide between advertising and editorial—in fact, the ad and circulation departments were housed on the other side of the building from where the editors and artists worked.
Magazines did publish crass little “articles” written by highly paid writers—earning far more than any of us did!—whose purpose was to plug paying advertisers. This was to be expected: magazines survive on ad revenue; subscription income does not suffice to support a print publication. However, ethical publishers mark advertorials as such: with a running header or footer saying something like “Advertisement.” Often advertorials are set off typographically and even printed on slightly different paper from the rest of the rag.
To publish advertising or SEO masquerading as an article without cluing the reader to the fact that the stuff is paid advertising is dishonest.
It is to lie.
That is why many publications do not print advertorial at all, and why those who do, if they have any decency at all, label them prominently as advertising.
Times have changed, of course, with the advent of the brave new world that is the Internet. And blogging is and is not journalism, though it has readers who presumably expect some standard of honesty from their writers. Here’s what journalistic webmaster Robert Niles says about the issue, writing at the Online Journalism Review:
The old rule: There must be a wall between advertising and editorial.
The new rule: Sell ads into ad space and report news in editorial space. And make sure to show the reader the difference.
Accordingly, I marked the paid-link peddler’s copy as a Sp0nsor3d Post!
This elicited a squawk of dismay. When I refused to remove the notice saying the post was a paid article containing links to the author’s clients’ sites, the deal fell through. Cheerfully, I removed the post from my site, and good riddance to it.
To cope with the practice of secreting paid links in fake stories, Google is now demanding that all links to commercial sites be coded as no-follow links. The would-be advertisers hate this, of course—because the link juice is what they’re paying for—and usually they will decline to place a paid link unless it’s do-follow. Many bloggers simply take a chance that Google will never catch them, and they justify the potential loss of page rank by arguing that PR doesn’t matter anyway.
Maybe it doesn’t, maybe it does. The technicalities of page rank are way above my pretty little head, and so I don’t trouble myself with them.
But one could argue, with some justice, that Google’s policy on paid do-follow links is hugely unfair, since Google Adsense places plenty of paid links on your site. And since Google pays nothing like what these often rather sleazy “advertisers” will pay, Google itself takes on a whiff of the exploitive.
About that, I say it is what it is.
Ironically, while Google’s policy is self-serving (their motive has nothing to do with ethics and everything to do with the way the company’s business model works), it in fact feeds into that fundamental journalistic ethic: the effect of the rule is to discourage deceptive content and to encourage separation of advertising and editorial.
Old-fashioned…but then so is “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
