Some news about the ads around here.

Apparently my previous ad service has been doing browser crypto mining without my knowledge. They paid next to nothing anyway, so I've fired them. For all none of you who'll miss the opportunity to get shitcoins pitched to you, I feel your pain.

I could just as easily not have ads at all; it would certainly make my life easier. But, as funny as this may sound, there's a certain legitimacy in advertising. Ads say a lot of dumb capitalist things, but they also say, in essence, that the advertiser believes in the medium it's advertising in. It's a declaration of solidarity of sorts. To a certain degree, a website that has a select few tasteful advertisements looks more established and legitimate than a website that does not.

After reviewing the advertising situation, I'm convinced that I will have no luck whatsoever selling ads through any established agency. First off, literally nobody is catering online ad sales to a communist market. That's just not a thing. If I sell ad space to any currently existing ad company, it'll be a wild mismatch of product and reader. I can't imagine any of my readership actually bought any of the shitcoins being hawked, and I certainly hope they didn't.

That's another thing. I think I want to believe in the product or service being sold, or at least believe that its sale is helping someone, somewhere, that I know on some level. I kinda shrugged at the crypto because it's something I've dabbled in in small ways in times past, I do know people who've gotten windfalls by getting in early on this or that shitcoin, and therefore it's not beyond the realm of possibility that one of the shitcoins being advertised might have been a good investment. But it's still not an investment I would have made, and therefore it was a pretty transparent effort on my part to turn eyeballs into revenue, and little else.

So I've got a new plan for the ads, going forward.

First off, I'm going to figure out a way to put several ads in rotation at once, so that every time you load a page on here, you're not shown the same exact ad you've already seen. I know this is possible; I successfully made a button for a forum I used to run that, if clicked, would put a random sloth video in your post. (It was a weirdass forum with its own byzantine meme culture, don't ask.) That alone should make the ads a bit more interesting and less likely to be tuned out.

Second off, I'm going to start it off by loading the ad rotation with several different ads for some of my other projects. My Patreon can always use some love, as well as my long-neglected webcomic. In the latter case, I've already got ads made, and they only need minor tweaks to be dusted off and put into service.

Third off is where you come in. Are you part of a communist organization doing good work in your community? Then make an ad for it, and I'll run it here for free. It doesn't even have to be a communist organization, probably; I'd probably happily run free ads for someone's GoFundMe if the cause was worthy enough. Free ads will run for as long as I feel like it, but any active campaign or organization will probably not have their ad cancelled.

Fourth off is also where you come in. Do you have a side hustle, or a socialist business? Pay me money and I'll run an ad for it here. I don't like having to get under the hood of the blog very often, so your ad will probably run for a year. It's not just that I hate coding, it's also that if it runs for a year, I can guarantee it'll get a decent chunk of eyeballs. This blog has existed for a little over a year. The stats engine built into Blogger is fairly conservative in counting pageviews, and only counts people who stick around for a good while, and I told it to ignore mine altogether. It's logged roughly 2000 hits in that time, not great but not bad considering this is the nichest-ass blog I'm aware of.

To expand on that point, the tiny niche of people this blog caters to is probably its biggest strength to the right advertiser, as well as its biggest weakness to most advertisers. If you're interested in advertising not just to communists but specifically to that section of communists that supports patriotic socialism and opposes the synthetic left, this is literally the best place on the internet to do so. It's a tiny niche, but it's been enjoying explosive growth as of late, as the efforts of myself and people like Caleb Maupin, Haz, the CPI, Dust James, Jackson Hinkle and the like have been bearing fruit.

What are the restrictions? Basically, no pornography in the ad itself. Although I'm not super-duper sold on the idea that there's nothing wrong at all with sex work, I'm not really a SWERF about it either, and like most aspects of the culture war I'm content to leave any final decisions about it up to the democratic will of the people of a given community. All that is to say that I'd be willing to run a tasteful ad for someone's OnlyFans, so long as Blogger didn't torch my blog over it. Given the number of, ah, vehemently pro-sex work people in the broader communist movement, such ads would have a much better chance of getting clickthroughs than the shitcoin ads ever did. Whatever else someone might think about sex work, IMHO it's certainly better to drive traffic to some broke proletarian selling lewd pics than to drive it to some megacorp selling literally anything.

But that's hardly the only possibility for ads here. Maybe you self-published a work of communist theory and you want to get the word out. I could definitely help with that. Maybe you're a fellow artist and you want more Patreon subscribers; I can hook you up. Whatever your side hustle, we can help one another out.

The last things to know are the ad sizes, and how to get in touch with me. I'll be offering two ad sizes: 160x600 skyscraper ads that'll go in the sidebar of every page, and 468x60 footer ads that'll go at the bottom of every post. If you can't digitally art for shit, I can make your ad for you for a nominal fee, or you can make your own. If any of this sounds of interest to you, email me at berniewouldvewon@gmail.com (yes, I had a Bernie phase, we all had a Bernie phase) and I'll get back to you within 24 hours.