There is a lot of humor here, 24 hours after Louis Gray posts the “Smaller Blogs do not deserve any ad revenue” you would have thought that there would be a firestorm, link bait is link bait, and starting something off with a title like that even we got into the act. With some humorous words from Louis himself on the blog.
50,700 links later in Google (here), you can get a great feel for what was going on yesterday when the world erupted and the Internet was consumed with the idea of why little bloggers in the food chain need or want to have advertising revenue.
There is a matter of expectation though that people really do need to think about. Get rich quick schemes hardly ever work, adsense is no different. While people bring up startups, and exceptions to the idea that people do not need/want ad revenue, realistically exceptions are going to exist, and depending on where you are in the process, ad revenue can sometimes go a long way in helping defray costs, but there is no reasonable expectation of buying a Ferrari tomorrow.
He does hit on a point, but as the day moves on, it looks a lot like link bait, which is good, and the Google stats shows that at least 50K opinions or aggregation feeds on the article. In the longer run, it was better for Louis and his non-advertising polluted blog.
If he had been a member of adsense, he could have made a fortune yesterday.
Keywords: humor, louis gray, advertising, revenue, google, link love, link bait, firestorm
Speaking of humor… it’s not as big as you make it sound. If you put quotes around the terms you used in Google: http://tinyurl.com/6dpgjh , you only have 3… results.
The best measurement, still, is Technorati: http://tinyurl.com/55edvs
And you know what? The phrase link bait never enters my mind when I’ve written something controversial (this included). I write it because I believe it. There could have been some massaging of words to make it softer, but I don’t write for controversy or for TechMeme, etc. They are simply byproducts of engaging content.
Another note – coming to your site has Google telling us it’s malware, and warning our computer can be harmed. Should look into that!
I know about the google thing, wrote about it here http://techwag.com/index.php/2008/04/18/getting-creative-with-the-loss-of-google-traffic/
it is interesting, there was a bad link at the hosting companies configuration file, and while we blog about it, they are quick to damn, very freaking slow to fix. Problem with a shared hosting makes things interesting.
It is still fun though, beginning bloggers can learn a lot about you, and how your blog basically became a new voice in the malestorm of blogging that is happening in the tech world.
Link bait? It is an interesting concept, but when someone drops a bombshell, it makes for link bait, that is the interesting part of the whole thing, some opinions lend themselves to link bait.