…and this is a 
This isn't exactly schadenfreude, it's more like merely recognizing the ungainly nature of the beast — but blog networks are always going to struggle a bit. Take a look at these posts from the Nature Network. It's not doom-and-gloom, it's just wrestling with the medium, as we've experienced here in recent weeks.
I do have a solution for any financial problems, though: we just need to peddle more T&A and celebrity gossip, like Huffpo. Isn't that a bit illiberal, though, to build your brand on the backs of salacious stories about women? Not to mention the quackery and woo.
Although I guess I am also guilty of building an audience with blatant T&A*, too.
*Only in my case, that stands for "tentacles and arms".
Comments
Posted by: mineralfellow
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July 26, 2010 3:20 PM
To fix the financial problem, why not just put a little "Donate" box up at the top of the blog? You get a million fucking views, and the other bloggers get hits as well, so it should be productive.......
Posted by: ralfnausk
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July 26, 2010 3:30 PM
The problem in financing might be that most internet-viewers are not willing to pay for content. Maybe we should poll how many Pharyngulites would be willing to pay, let's say 5 $ a month for reading and commenting. That would mean without advertisement... I would vote: Yes - but how many others?
Posted by: Capital Dan
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July 26, 2010 3:42 PM
I say BAKE SALE!
Posted by: lizditz
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July 26, 2010 3:45 PM
Silicon Valley Mom's Blog will close at the end of the month.
http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_15580055
The reason: the revenue from advertising couldn't keep up with growth.
Before you sniff about "mommy blogging" -- SV Moms blog had 12 affiliate sites in other metropolitan areas.
Posted by: Zeno
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July 26, 2010 3:47 PM
Well, I guess if you're doing both T&A and beefcake, that would be even-handed, right? (I'm not sure where octopus porn fits into that.)
Posted by: mikerattlesnake
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July 26, 2010 3:48 PM
the arms, how they grasp. *drool*
Posted by: firemote
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July 26, 2010 3:50 PM
Always doubt the sincerity of any born-againer. Huffington found a good gimmick. She was never "liberal", but she wants to be invited to our parties and be a "media darling". Both of what she is, because at a certain point, everyone backslaps you for achieving as much while expending so little thought and effort.Posted by: truthspeaker
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July 26, 2010 3:57 PM
I suggest going for salacious photos but being equal opportunity about it. Throw up a photo of a shirtless Gerard Butler and you could probably even get my girlfriend to read about science, or at least visit your blog.
I'd be happy to pose for photos, but we're trying to attract readers, not repel them.
Posted by: UXO
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July 26, 2010 4:00 PM
Sell dispensations! Five bucks gets you official Pharyngula Phorgiveness (TM) for a spelling mistake, ten'll void one grammar error, fifty for a trolling incident...
Posted by: jradxit
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July 26, 2010 4:05 PM
Maybe have an educational system that's worth a crap so there's a wider audience for truth and intellectual curiosity? Um.... never mind, better stick to the T&A.
Posted by: Mattir-ritated
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July 26, 2010 4:13 PM
I second the donations box. I just don't want it to be enriching SEED stockholders more than it enriches bloggers, and I'd need a bit more transparency before I trusted that such was the case.
Posted by: z1freeride
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July 26, 2010 4:13 PM
I never click on ads but I'd be willing to pay a couple bucks a month to not see ads ever again.
Yes, I know about ad-block for Firefox but I'm a Chrome user and I haven't yet figured out ad block with chrome. But Chrome's usability and speed make it so worth dealing with the occasional advertisement.
Posted by: feralboy12
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July 26, 2010 4:18 PM
Maybe some posts featuring photos of sexy scientists would help.
Kidding. Sorry.
Please don't hate me. I'm not that bad.
Posted by: abhollandbeck
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July 26, 2010 4:34 PM
Oh, I don't know. An "Atheist of the Week" pictorial wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. Each week, a new bikini-clad atheist could shake her A's for your grateful fans. The male ones, anyway. Pretty soon, everyone would know that Pharyngula has the hottest heathens!
Posted by: ing St Hawk
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July 26, 2010 4:40 PM
Quackery and woo makes the world go around,the world go around,the world go around...
Posted by: Owlmirror
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July 26, 2010 4:44 PM
... I have just had a brilliant 1 idea!
Genetically engineered prehensile breast-tentacles!
How many times have you wished for an extra pair of arms? How about having them right in front, where they can hold a sandwich while you turn pages or type with your outer arms? Nursing mothers could use them to hold the infant while using their outer arms for other things. Joggers and athletes would no doubt love being able to wrap the things around their torsos so as to avoid all that damn bouncing. Heck, you could come up with new athletic events that use the breast-tentacles!
And just think of what they would do for pr0n... !!
_________________________________________________________
1: WARNING: Actual brilliance of idea may vary. Consult your local brilliant ideologist. Not responsible for horrible biological accidents that result in tentacles everywhere on your body. Do Not Taunt Prehensile Breast-Tentacles.
Posted by: ronsullivan
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July 26, 2010 4:51 PM
... bikini-clad atheist could shake her A's ...
This would be annoying—you first, guys! Heathens before Sheathens!—if it weren't so bewildering. Are you talking about a total of four buttocks here? Does The Man with Three Buttocks have one-and-a-half A('s)? How do you tailor a bikini for an octopus? How 'bout a Speedo for a squid? A banana hammock for a nautilus? What exactly do you, y'know, put where?
Are there fans who don't know their (or anyone else's) T's from their A's? And do we really need all those apostrophes?
Posted by: Peter Ashby
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July 26, 2010 4:51 PM
@z1freeride
I'm signed in with opendns and use the Vienna RSS aggregator for Mac that has no plugin abilities either, yet I see no ads here apart from a Seed one top right.
Posted by: Draken
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July 26, 2010 5:01 PM
#2, payment per month doesn't appeal to me terribly much. You see, in the good old days we had subscriptions to 1 or a few printed magazines which you really liked, and subscribers would stay faithful with their magazines for years on end, mostly because they forgot to unsubscribe in time.
That is of course not how blogs and websites work. There are literally dozens of them, I read some articles on them here-and-there, now-and-then, but even blogs I like may lose my interest for a while as I shift attentention to another one. So I don't want to pay monthly fees for them all and leave a slew of paid-but-unused websites behind.
Rather, I'd like to have an online purse, and a button on each article "Liked this article? Donate US$ 0.50" or so. A small amount, but the incentive to click and pay would be much higher. Such a button should of course be hassle-free (single click, not the whole purgatory of a Paypal sequence) and offer very good guarantees for anonimity.
To put it a bit banally, if you're hungry for a Mars bar, you don't want to subscribe to a $400 plan that offers you three months worth of Mars, Snickers and Milky Way whether you eat them or not. You go out to the kiosk and buy a Mars bar. And blog postings and even other web pages are mostly that- something to chew on and and enjoy for a while, and probably forget in a short time.
Posted by: Grumpy1942
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July 26, 2010 5:04 PM
Some of are shut-ins on Social Security. Blog reading takes up most of the day. At $5.00/mo/blog that would pretty much put an end to it.
Posted by: sqlrob
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July 26, 2010 5:37 PM
Same way you do in firefox. Install the extension.
Posted by: Audley Z. Darkheart OM, purveyor of candy and lies
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July 26, 2010 5:48 PM
If cephalopods don't want to be ogled by the likes of us, they should put some damn clothes on!
Posted by: YetAnotherAtheist
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July 26, 2010 5:52 PM
T&A? I say we all chant, "Show your squids! Show your squids! Show your squids!"
Posted by: Moggie
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July 26, 2010 5:56 PM
#9:
Do you want to reduce Rev BDC to penury?
Posted by: Audley Z. Darkheart OM, purveyor of candy and lies
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July 26, 2010 6:24 PM
#2:
I would be willing to pay* (and it would keep the trolls to a bare minimum), but I think one of the great joys of Pharyngula is the diversity posters here.
Simply put, not everyone can spare the $5/month and I think you'd see our little community start to crumble if this blog was behind a pay wall.
*FFS, I pay for an SA account that I never use.
Posted by: broboxley OT
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July 26, 2010 6:46 PM
Bob Metcalf had the answer years ago. Micromoney across the internet. In the 1990's the idea was laughed at but now it is technically feasible. Google Microsoft Yahoo and others are large enough to manage both sides of the transaction. If you want an email to hit my inbox and you are not in my address book 10 cents. My preferred micro money manager would skim 10% and then credit the balance to me. I then could make deposits to the micromoney icon on blocks I like as contributions. If I read more blogs than I get spam I could chuck a few dollars into my account easily thru paypal. The pass thru costs help releive the costs of the infrastructure as well as assisting all of us who have to manage spam content, which is 97% of all email traffic at the moment.
Posted by: broboxley OT
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July 26, 2010 6:49 PM
gah! sorry for the bad spelling on post 26, my eyes are giving me fits
Posted by: notVerneant
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July 26, 2010 7:35 PM
done
Posted by: notVerneant
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July 26, 2010 7:39 PM
err, left out the most important part:
Posted by: A. Nuran
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July 26, 2010 7:59 PM
In a welcome if uncommon development the HuffPo had a column by an actual MD who gave evidence-based commonsense advice. Dr. Braunstein of Cedar-Sinai talked about the idiocy of that Master Cleanse Woo-Fest Fast.
Posted by: broboxley OT
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July 26, 2010 8:33 PM
@A. Nuran #30 good article. Sometimes one has to be careful when discussing medical woo. An old friend was bemoaning his colon and so I said "have you tried a coffee enema? George Hamilton swore by them. He stated that he drank martinis all night and a coffee enema got him good to go in the morning" we both laughed.
Apparently my friend hadnt seen the movie Crocodile Dundee. His detailed description of a self inflicted coffee enema is too graphic to be posted here but suffice to say painting the walls is the least of the details.
He swears by them now....
Posted by: 'Tis Himself, Quel Dommage
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July 26, 2010 8:51 PM
notVerneant #28 & #29
WTF?
Posted by: broboxley OT
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July 26, 2010 8:58 PM
'Tis Himself, OM 28,29 its pics of tits and ass
Posted by: 'Tis Himself, Quel Dommage
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July 26, 2010 9:23 PM
Oh.
Posted by: Caine, ghetto féministe
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July 26, 2010 9:36 PM
ralfnausk:
The problem there is, a lot of people who post regularly here literally cannot afford $5.00 a month, even $2.00 a month would be too much. While I'd be willing to pay, there might be stretches where that would be difficult for me.
Bottom line, a lot of people would end up lost if a paywall was instituted and that would be a shame. There's a great diversity of people here and I wouldn't like to see that change.
Posted by: Athena
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July 26, 2010 11:24 PM
Like many of you, I'm in the same financial boat (the U.S.S. Pennypincher), so paying for access isn't feasible.
And Moggie @24: My first thought was of the Rev.BDC too. LOL!
Posted by: jefrir
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July 27, 2010 4:12 AM
A paywall would also discourage new readers, because who's going to pay for something they've never tried reading? A donation button could work well though, if it was clear where the money was going.
Personally I think targeted ads are the answer - the ones on Ravelry are often pretty, and interesting, and I've clicked through on a good few of them. I have never clicked on an ad on any other website, so they're clearly doing something right.
Posted by: Penny
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July 27, 2010 6:51 AM
As I understand it (but I may be wrong), revenue to the site from ads comes from clicking the ads, not from purchasing anything from the advertiser.
So in lieu of paying actual cash, maybe folks should just click on ads next to articles they like - takes a few seconds of your time, earns the blog some pennies, and as a bonus, if they're stupid woo-type ads, the advertisers have to pay even though there is no chance of them making any money from the click.
Posted by: MosesZD
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July 27, 2010 7:11 AM
The day Science Blogs becomes like HuffPo (the Fox news of the left, full of bullshit and TA) I hit the road.
Posted by: PZ Myers
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July 27, 2010 10:12 AM
There is absolutely no intent to put up a paywall -- I'd leave immediately if that happened.
There is absolutely no intent to put up T&A. We have very loose contracts that allow us to do just about anything we want, but full-on porn is prohibited (I'd be kicked out if I did that), and exploitation is seriously frowned upon by the community here. Scienceblogs as a whole is relatively pro-feminist -- it's part of the general culture here.
Ads are sold by impressions, not clicks, as I understand it. You don't need to click on them to make money for Seed, just allow them to be displayed.
I agree that the best solution all around that would be more profitable and would also get rid of some of the noise is targeted ads. It's what the advertisers want, too. Of course, that wouldn't end the problem: Scientologists and creationists like to target science sites for their ads, you know.