I spotted this over on Cryptogon, but the original article is AP: FTC plans to monitor blogs for claims, payments

$500 free laptops? Gift cards? Holy shit, I’m missing the boat here. Nobody has ever offered me anything like that.

But my jaw really dropped when I read that Cryptogon requires $1,000 a month in donations, or will close shop.

I’m not begrudging anybody anything that they might make on their blogs, but something is desperately wrong here.

I’ve refused to commercialize the blog and all links, articles and original works found here are all free. There are no affiliate accounts, no advertisers, no revenue streams, nothing. And for whatever it’s “worth” (almost nothing apparently), there are no contributers, supporters, back room deals, kickbacks, zip, nada.

I’ve not been one to beat anybody up over donations, but this year, blog donations to date are exactly $185.

January 2009
Melissa - $10
Halley - $25
Jeff - $50
Mary - $100

February $0

March $0

April $0

May $0

June $0

2008 was only slightly better:

December 2008
$29 - Ryan
$20 - John

November
Halley $25

October $0

September
Kevin $100

August
Paul $25

July
Gerald $10
Gregory $25

June
Dennis $50

May
Marlies $50

April
Jeff $100
Judith
April $10

March
Patrick $250
Sean $20
Steven $100
Michelle $100

February $0

January $0

I have no idea what the FTC is worried about. My donations wouldn’t feed a hungry flea for a year (assuming it requires a dog to feed on). I’ve spent thousands of hours here and that works out to about .40 cents an hour. This does not count the other website I also run (which I will not link to) or the three forums I ran with the help of Lonewolf.

I won’t go into my expenses of maintaining the blog or the website, or the advertisers I pay, but my Google account alone was thousands more then what was received in donations. My own donations to others is over five times what my two year blog donations received were.

Good grief. I am too embarrassed to even allow comments on this post, and have removed my own donation link (permanently). I am NOT asking anybody for money, but it’s dead obvious that the “value” of this blog is near worthless.

Here are some stats from this year — Unique Visitors for 2009:

Jan — 46,421
Feb — 32,671
Mar — 46,622
Apr — 32,354
May — 28,849
Jun — 21,203

May 2009 had 118,204 blog page views. April had 129,019 blog page views. Last year, the stats were even higher. So some of you are reading the blog repeatedly and often. The blog is by far, receiving the lions share of site activity, exceeding my other site by nearly 50% on all stats.

I’ll be honest, this definitely makes me want to quit writing, not because of the money, but in spite of it. Let me explain.

I am not a capitalist, and don’t like this model of living at all. But I’m surrounded by capitalists, everywhere. Money is the metric everyone else uses to measure “value”. This is the metric you use. Do you get it? When you fail to support what you use a lot, the metric that you use reveals this fact. So I use the same metric as a measuring stick. And what it shows is that this blog is nearly worthless in your eyes.

I expect this is going to cause an uproar, but I’ve always been here to tell the truth. Do not send me your money. The blog stats alone tell me how large or how small my readership is. That is the other metric — I can view the blog stats and see who’s reading what, and how many countries are affected and how many total readers I have.

So you want a free ride. Well, it’s pretty much what you’ve been given. If your name is not on the list above, well, there you go.

Now to my point (after I made plenty of you angry, but sometimes, that’s what you’ve got to do).

This is why we cannot save ourselves. Because we fail to value the things right in front of us.

Those of you that still think we are going to save civilization are mistaken. Those of you that think we are going to save the environment are mistaken. Those of you that think we are going to save anything are mistaken.

Because we fail to value what we already have. We don’t appreciate it, we don’t value it, and we don’t want to be troubled or reminded that we need to support it.

We’d much rather just take it. Which is exactly what we are doing. All over the world.

And that is why we cannot save ourselves.