Jason Kottke is an A-list blogger who recently quit his day job to pursue blogging full time. His revenue model of choice is the Pay Pal tip jar. Given the enormous traffic to his site, it may work.
According to Wired, Kottke is avoiding the ad-based revenue model because, as a one-man operation, there’s no easy way to neatly separate editorial and advertising.
“Advertising introduces a third party into the relationship between me and my readers,” Kottke said. “I don’t want to be doing things on my site that are geared more to advertisers than to readers.”
To me, this purist mentality seems misplaced, if not a tad crazy. Of course, it’s perfectly fine if one can afford it. I guess time will tell if Jason can indeed afford to turn his back on this most obvious (and in most cases, benign) source of blog revenue.
Great post. I’ve been following Kottke’s story as well. His strategy of utilizing a patronage system for financial support is particularly interesting amid a wealthy middle-class society, which doesn’t often patronize writers/arts (let alone bloggers) but does patronize movie theaters, restaurants and department stores.