Tagged with the musical chairs

I’ve been featured by MOG!

Mog Music Network

I got an e-mail this morning from Sonic Dice with something interesting. Apparently, the MOG Music Network had featured the review that I did of the new Art Brut album (brilliantly titled Art Brut Vs. Satan) for Sonic Dice in their newsletter. Considering that the newsletter goes out to a lot of people around the world that is pretty big exposure not just for me personally but for Sonic Dice as a website. I was very humbled but I didn’t know much about MOG so I did some reading up.

Upon investigating I signed up The Musical Chairs to the service as what it essentially is as a form of advertising for independent music blogs. Websites sign up for the service for two reasons – exposure and advertising money (it should be pointed out that at this time I currently have no revenue for The Musical Chairs – it is all out of my own pocket). Here’s a much better description:

MMN’s purpose is to help affiliate sites drive more traffic and generate revenue from advertising. MMN builds online advertising packages that deliver unique benefits over typical ad networks or Google AdSense, including the opportunity to:

— Increase exposure and drive traffic: Headlines and excerpts from MMN affiliates’ posts are published via RSS to an audience of millions of music fans across MOG and the entire network, who click through to read full posts. — Increase search engine rankings. — Get access to premier brand advertisers. — Command premium CPMs. — Control the kinds of ads and advertisers displayed. — Set CPM minimums exceeding leading third-party ad sales solutions.

“We’re not just repping ads here,” said David Hyman, MOG’s CEO and founder. “MOG has already built the largest pure music blogging platform. Now we’re opening MOG’s doors and integrating independent music blogs into our platform. They get to find a brand new audience while benefiting from our back end of community and streaming music.”

It’s all very exciting because I’m always looking for ways to promote my site in a way that doesn’t feel contrived or non-beneficial to the reader. I like MMG because not only will it (I hope) bring new readers to the site but also link me up to read other music blogs and websites that are under the radar that I’ve completely missed. I’m always on the lookout for new sites to add to my packed bookmarks and this is a good way to do it in my opinion.

And it’s sunny outside! Yay!

Tagged , , , ,

Donation

Donation Box

I don’t get paid for any of the writings I do on my own sites. Nearly everything on The Musical Chairs from the hosting to domain name to manual labour of updating is all put in by me and the domain name for this blog was bought by me. Obviously this takes money out of my account (hosting, domains, going to gigs etc) and now that I do not have a part-time job to live on I have to budget enormously, especially in this age of recession. But I don’t the quality of content to lower because of it.

For a while now, I’ve been thinking about adding an option to allow readers to donate money if they really like an article they read on it. However, I don’t want to do this in a way that sounded like either:

  1. Sounded like you must give me money for fear of feeling guilty.
  2. Sounded like it was a sympathy thing.

So in order to combat these issues, the donation box would simply be something on the sidebar, with a short explanation and a maximum donation limit of £1. This is done because, at the end of the day, that is nearly the price you would pay for a quality newspaper and under the price you would pay for a weekly magazine. So the option is there, if a reader wants to. I also find this way of money-making a lot more human and satisfactory than just dumping adverts.

This ultimately brings up the debate about paying for news on the Internet and Walter Isaacson was on The Daily Show recently to talk about his recent cover feature for Time, How To Save Your Newspaper, about whether or not we should pay for news on the internet.

Tagged , , , , ,
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.