5,000,000 Megabytes. 5 Terabytes.
That’s the amount of data downloaded from my “blog” in February of 2011 alone. Hundreds of custom videos, 4 years of AEE photos, 4,000 word articles … at one point, I had 118,000 of my own Vegas photographs spread over a variety of web servers.
For 5 straight years, I supported ‘Vegas Rex’, at a somewhat high cost at times, and I was glad to do it. In a day and age where most people won’t put anything online until they figure out how to monetize it first, I put it all up there without any plan whatsoever.
Eventually, for whatever reason, the site got kind of big. I don’t think it had anything to do with my own efforts so much as the fact that Vegas is just a hugely popular place. At one point, we had two dedicated servers just to serve images and nothing else. My famous 20+ photo-posts were bringing servers to their knees, and instead of doing the gratuitous slideshow thing, we rented out two more boxes at a couple of hundred dollars per month. Each.
At the beginning of this year, things were looking good for keeping it all online. I got an offer for a writing gig, and the money was really good. Go me. Unfortunately, the devil was in the details.
You see, in order to receive this great money, I had to write certain things in certain ways. I had to say that I liked things, that I may not have liked. I had to promote things without it being known that I was being paid to promote them. The rationale was that I had built up an audience that trusted me, and it was a good opportunity to cash in on that trust.
I took a few days to think about it, and I’m not proud of this. If I was a truly ethical person, I would have immediately dismissed the offer out of hand. I didn’t, though.
“For God’s sake”, I told myself, “Pearl Jam made a fucking Target commercial and they still sell out arenas. Who’s going to care if some stupid pissant blogger lies about a few products? I bet they won’t even notice.”
Before making a final decision, I remembered the motto seared into the brain of every aging Dischord Kid. WWIMD (What would Ian MacKaye do)?
“Ian would take the money!”, I yelled to nobody in particular. “That DIY shit is all an act. I bet that bald headed, Matt Drudge-looking motherfucker is in Cabo right now, drinking tequila, doing lines, and banging Sammy Hagar’s sloppy seconds!”.
Oh, how I wanted it to be true.
I knew it wasn’t, though. I knew that I had to politely decline. And so I did.
A month later, with some disappointment, I deleted all of my online content prior to 2011. As I was taking it down, I was stunned at just how much stuff I had published. Without exaggerating, I honestly had more original Vegas multi-media content than any other website on the Internet. It was a ton of stuff for just one guy.
Almost immediately after taking it down, my inbox was inundated. People yelled at me for deleting the site. They were angry. They told me that I was insane because I removed all of the content that made my blog popular. One guy said “Are you sure you thought this out? Your revenue is going to plummet.”
“Revenue?”, I thought, “What revenue?”
I’ve made some money through paid writing gigs over the years, but my blog has never made any money. It wasn’t for complete lack of trying, either.
A few years ago, while I was getting a ridiculous amount of traffic, we put a “Donate” button on my blog. The Consumerist does this, and they don’t even write their own articles. They just cut-and-paste from elsewhere and let people talk in the comment section. If those plagiarists got donations, imagine how much I would make for authoring my own stuff!
I couldn’t lose, and so the Webmaster put the button up.
The result?
After several months of serving up pages to hundreds of thousands of unique visitors, I got 7 donations. As in, nine minus two equals seven. I appreciated them. It sure beats zero. It wasn’t lucrative enough to continue begging, though. I asked that the button be removed.
What can I tell you, it’s a Justin Bieber world. The Melvins are still playing the Croc while that little peckerhead is selling out arenas. People don’t want seven minute videos of Vegas Strip action. They want pictures of cats. Lots and lots of pictures of cats. Preferably pictures of cats overlaid with grammatically incorrect captions.
Another Cat Photo Captioned
We took the donate thing down and replaced it with Google Ads. After making something like 3 cents per day (apparently speaking badly of Google while repeatedly using the word “fuck” results in lower payouts), we deleted those too. The day after removing Google Ads from our site, our “Page Rank” dropped from a 5 to a 0. I am not exaggerating.
The.
Day.
After.
Do no evil motherfuckers!
If Steve Jobs wasn’t such a sweatshop-running, psychopathic prick, I would be typing this post on an iPad.
I digress.
Flash forward a bit.
This past Saturday, I rolled out of bed, sick as a dog with a temperature of 103. The day before, I had a medical procedure, and it turns out I was having a reaction to the antibiotic. It was my second procedure of the week. To make matters worse, I still felt sedated.
Shortly after awakening, my tablet vibrated. I looked down, and a notification read “Solstice Bike Ride 11:45am”.
“Fuck my life!”, I yelled, “that goddamn Fremont thing is today!”
“Clearly you are in no condition to go to Fremont”, came a reply.
Everyone in my household insisted that I stay home, but instead I took some Tylenol for my fever, laid down until it kicked in, then jumped on my scooter and rode 30 minutes in the steady rain, yelling “Fuck my life!” at frequent enough intervals to keep me from nodding off.
On a positive note, I came up with a great new song that I think will really catch on. It sounds exactly like what Stairway to Heaven would sound like if you replaced all the great lyrics and instrument tracks with one guy randomly shouting “Fuck my life!”.
When I got home, I cobbled together a video, uploaded a few dozen photos, and went to sleep.
When I awoke, I checked the site and noticed that someone had put a donate button on the homepage. It was my own esteemed Webmaster. I called him up (he is back East), and said “What the hell is this?”.
“You work hard on this stuff and Google Ads are a joke. Just let me try it for a little while”, he said.
“Don’t you remember what happened last time?”, I replied, “It was a disaster. It was embarrasing. Not to mention, I am *this close* to replacing that Jean Enersen chick on King 5. In fact, listen to this … ‘I’m Rex, linking you to better health!’. See, I got that line down, I’m a shoo-in!”
In the end, however, I acquiesced. Even though the King 5 thing is practically a done deal, it doesn’t hurt to have a Plan B. I’ve got to be honest, though, I wasn’t optimistic.
This being the case, imagine my surprise when I opened today’s email. I got a message from Webmaster, and it read in part: “You made more in three days virtually busking than you did all of last month with Google Ads”.
Well shave my scrotum and call it Kojak.
This didn’t happen back when I had 50x the traffic. It made no sense. I was happy nonetheless. Granted, the corporate media supported blogs are still laughing at my bankroll, but I still really appreciate it. Money is hard to come by in this economy and people are hurting.
If I make anything, I will try to do no evil. Eventually, I want to get a helmet-mounted HD video camera and make tours of all of the great neighborhoods in Seattle. I want to use that same camera to take the Seattle Segway Tour and video it from beginning to end. I want to ride The Ducks and make a feature article on the attraction, etc, etc. I’ve got more ideas than time and money, though. My volunteer work with the National Organization for Women keeps me pretty busy these days.
Still, after paying to be shat upon for six years, it’s kind of nice. We’ve been trying again with the Google Ads, but nobody clicks ads. I obviously can’t get sponsors for the blog because I’m too “controversial”, whatever that means. The fact that I post pictures of naked bicycle riders doesn’t help matters either.
Does Jean Enersen give you pictures of naked bicyclists?
Well, does she?
Ask her.
Seriously, fire off an email right now to jenersen@king5.com, and ask her if she will give you pictures of naked bicyclists.
Go ahead, I’ll wait.
.
.
.
So, what did she say?
Did I nail it or what?
The answer was “no”, wasn’t it?
No, Jean Enersen won’t give you pictures of naked bicyclists, and that women has more money than God. We’re talking the God Caucasians pray to, not the one those African click-talkers pray to. The least she could do is go out and get some frigging shots of naked bicyclists.
Linking you to better health my ass.
Dammit, where was I? I know Novartis claims that Ritalin lasts 4 hours, but trust me, it does not last anywhere near four fucking hours. If it lasted four hours then I wouldn’t have forgotten what I was talking abOh yeah, I had a point. For those of you that still support the whole DIY thing, and those of you that tip even when you aren’t being extorted by some lame hipster douchenozzle with a magic marker and a misguided sense of irony, thank you.
God knows when you don't tip.
I suppose this entire post was a long-winded way of saying:
Thanks. I really do appreciate it.
I suppose I could have just come out and said that 1,700 words ago.
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