Archive for the 'Money' Category

What the fuck? No, really, what the fucking fuck?

Published at June 23, 2009 in Money, Rich fucks and New York Fugging City. 3 Comments

We’re selling naming rights to subway stations now?

If a $4 million deal is approved on Wednesday, the nexus of subway stops at Atlantic Avenue, Pacific Street and Flatbush Avenue in Downtown Brooklyn will add an additional name to its already lengthy title: Barclays.

This may seem odd, since Barclays is a bank based in London with offices in Manhattan, and the only Barclay Street on the city map is not even in Brooklyn. (It’s in Manhattan, in the financial district.)

Oh, but guess who’s behind this little deal?

There will, however, soon be a Barclays Center, the sports arena planned as the focal point of the Atlantic Yards project, and the developer, Forest City Ratner, has agreed to pay the transportation authority $200,000 a year for the next 20 years to rename one of the oldest and busiest stations in the borough.

I might have known. The MTA and Forest City Ratner are awfully cozy these days.  And the Times blithely rolls along with cute little gosh-that’s-a-mouthful jokes and largely uncritical coverage of the massive boondoggle that is Atlantic Yards.

What you can, and can’t, expect from blogging

Published at April 19, 2009 in Meta and Money. 31 Comments

I spent three years or so writing for two big, A-list political/feminist blogs. So I know a thing or two about blogging, and what to expect from it. And more importantly, what NOT to expect from it.

And what you can NOT expect from blogging is that readers pay you for the content you put out there for free.

Not that you can’t make some money from a blog. But it’s important to understand just what it is that makes the money. See, it’s not your content. It’s your audience. Because where you make your money on a blog is from advertising, and the rates for advertising are dependent on your audience, both its size and its perceived interests. If your blog has a large audience of the kind of people who advertisers think will spend money on their products (such as food blogs or Apartment Therapy), you can charge them to access your audience via paid advertising. If you don’t have much of an audience (or your audience is not perceived as the type to spend money*), you won’t be able to charge much. You attract the audience via content or widgets or what have you, but don’t kid yourself that it’s your writing that pays the bills.

Newspapers, magazines, radio and TV work the same way — I did a few years in journalism back in the day as well, and I can tell you that the size of the paper is not determined by how much news there is, but by how much advertising was sold for the day.** Indeed, when the paper goes to layout, the number of pages is determined by the number, size and placement of the ads, with the total ad space over a certain percentage of the available space. What is left is called the “news hole.” So when your editor wants 12 column-inches on a story, that means that that’s all the space you have available to you for your content, even if what you have is really a 16-inch story. Your content, in a way, is immaterial to the business side of the operation (and there is a division, traditionally, between editorial and business), except inasmuch as it brings in readers, increases circulation, and makes it easier for them to sell advertising at good rates. Your content, in other words, is a delivery vehicle for the ads, which is the profit-generating part of the business. This holds true even if you’re a blogger for a traditional-media outlet and get paid for your content. As Roy Edroso said in response to Dan Collins’ asking him about what kind of welfare the Village Voice gave him:

Keep this under your hat, but the Voice sells ads and uses the money to pay us. That’s capitalism, comrade, and as much as you and I dislike it, it’s the deal we’re stuck with.

Dan, you may or may not know, writes for Protein Wisdom, which was one of the right-wing blogs supported by Pajamas Media (he took offense to Roy’s characterization of the Pajamas Media arrangement as “welfare” and decided to hurl it back, without understanding that there is more than one model out there). At least until Roger Simon and the boys pulled the plug on the financial support they were giving the blogs, in favor of putting money into PJTV, which is a subscription-model podcasty sort of thing. Mostly, it seems to involve stilted videos by Dr. Helen supporting the patriarchy. And Joe the Plumber.

Mind you, unlike blogs, newspapers have separate advertising reps, whose entire job it is to sell advertising space and thus generate revenue. Blogs generally rely on ad networks to sell ad space, with varying results. Another problem is that advertisers underpay (or bypass) blogs due to faulty perceptions. But if you’re going to make money at blogging as a blog owner,*** you have to devote a certain percentage of your time and brainspace to the business side of things. Continue reading ‘What you can, and can’t, expect from blogging’

How to get lucky in the stock market

Published at March 16, 2009 in Money and Spend!. 2 Comments

I’ve been thinking about that line from Wargames in regard to the stock market:  The only way to win is not to play.

For years, I’ve been kicking myself about not having a job that affords me 401(k), and not having an IRA, and in general being in a very precarious situation financially — that was, of course, my own doing, intermittent periods of unemployment notwithstanding.

And when I sold my apartment last year and wound up with a big chunk of money in my hand, I thought I should invest it, or put it somewhere it could make some money for me.  It’s not that I trusted the stock market, exactly, but it seemed like a reasonable thing to do, and interest rates on Treasury securities were so lousy.  Instead, because I couldn’t get past the inertia, I just parked it in an online savings account and some CDs.

Probably a good decision, I’m thinking, even if my savings account’s interest rate has been slashed to 1.65% recently due to the financial crisis.  Not that I really “decided” so much as defaulted into this position.