Sponsor Me, If You Will

You say that the inspiration comes from other sponsored bloggers, but there's a difference between what you are asking and what they are asking. John Gruber and Marco Arment have both created useful products. They proved that if they have the freedom to manage their own time, then they will build things that other people want to use. I flipped through many of your blog posts and Tweets trying to get a feel for the type of work you do. I couldn't find anything of value.

All I found were number of pop culture references and one paragraph summaries of tiny projects that you gave up on when the time came to implement. For example, Maelstrom was something that was related to Twitter streams. If I'm reading the dates correctly, you appear to have started work on the 18th and then quit the following day, stating burnout after a few hours of programming. Now its the 20th, and you are here asking for money. That is not the type of work ethic that gives me any confidence in your ability to produce valuable content in the future.

@Prawn compared this to the million dollar homepage. However, I think there's a big disconnect between the two. That homepage was always explained as an advertising experiment. You are asking for money in the hopes that a few hundred dollars will be the missing key to producing anything of value.

It feels smarmy to me (someone who works a 9-5 and still manages to slowly grow his own company in his free time) to see someone who built nothing of value ask for a hand out. Its actually worse than building nothing. There is evidence that you cannot focus on a project for more than a weekend.

In all honesty, if your Twitter account hadn't been created back in September, I would assume this is another elaborate test to see how social networks can be gamed.

If that all came across as overtly negative, then good. I think that we could all use more positive comments when they are warranted, but I cannot find anything about this that isn't slimy.

To be fair, if anyone cares to dig through my own history, it's easy to find that I actually did the same thing at one point in my life. The difference is that I was 15 at the time.

At some point, the Million Dollar Homepage seemed ridiculous, but once it started getting press (and thus pagerank), links from it increased in value. Was nofollow a common thing back then? There would've been a sweet spot when it was notable enough to get press, but not enough for your link to be swamped amongst many others.

Assuming there's still traffic beyond the initial 800 HN visitors, $5 for a couple thousand more targeted viewers isn't ridiculous.

I sometimes see incredibly widely spaced lines in full-line-width justified blogs (first word of the next line is a very long word that doesn't fit in the previous line), which always made for an awkward experience. Hats off to Wordpress for implementing this.

To give you some figures from jgc.org:

On May 13, 2010 I added a link to every blog post taking readers to Amazon.com to buy my book. Since then I have had 2,699,126 page views and 14,191 clicks on the link resulting in total money to me of $560.59.

So three years at 75,000 page views a month worked out to $15 a month.

Gruber is getting 5 million page views a month (66x jgc.org) and getting $37,000 (2,500x jgc.org).

Yes, I could probably monetize jgc.org better, but what I'd really need is page views.

[1] http://tomato.es/pages/sponsors

At that point, you may even choose not to because your built-up audience will buy from you.

That said, there is no harm in trying. There may be takers. The only problem is that if there are a lot of takers, HN could be overrun with this sort of stuff.

I wish you success!