Tune in very soon to read about my four day rural retreat to a very rural part of Kenya, (to places far off of the electrical grid and without running water and what not), where I learned about agricultural and environmental issues in Kenya in a rural setting. It is taking some time to write and will be quite long I believe as it covers a four day period that was quite eventful. This will be coming within the next day.
I am writing this post because I need some help/advice from you. I recently received an email from an advertising agency www.wikimetro.org asking if I wanted to partner with them/ have them sponsor my blog. Basically they were asking if I would want to sell advertising on my blog. I received this email and have this opportunity because I have a high number of traffic on my blog thanks to all of you who read it. I thank you very much for reading my blog and feel very honoured and flattered that so many people read it. I responded with an inquiry about the details of the sponsorship and have yet to hear back. This opportunity puts me in a dilemma. While this would be an opportunity for me to make some money, it also feels like a way of making my blog less personal and in a way I would feel like i am selling myself. As a member of new media(blogs, youtube, picture posting websites), I am seeing blogs go the way of old media, and I do not exactly like the direction that it is heading. I had a class last semester called news, media, and foreign policy in which we tracked the ammount of advertising in the Washington Post for an entire week, and on average for the whole week 70-80 percent of the total amount of spaces on the pages in the newspaper were devoted to advertising and not to stories. This frustrates me to see this type of thing but it is like this across the board with advertising in both big and small papers.
I am writing this to ask for your opinion because this blog is for you the readers as much as it is for me the writer of the blogpost. I want your opinion on whether I should open this blog up to advertising, which would make me some money, or keep it closed and an ordinary blog full of my stories and lessons about Africa. Please leave comments with your opinion on the situation, you can leave it as anonymous or as your log in name (if you have one), I do not care I am just looking for advice and help on the situation/ potential option.
Thank you very much for your input and for reading this blog and I will have another post to you shortly.
No comments:
Post a Comment