Nobody Is Safe
So I redesigned the blog, substantially.
Yep. you see ads. They are served up randomly by Google and a couple of others I’m testing out. I like them, and I’ll tell you why.
- They make me money for my efforts
- They aren’t fake
It’s that second point that’s most for me. Everybody else does affiliate shit and I won’t do any. That’s where they have a code for “paleo Brownies” or some such other “Paleo” junk food (or Low Carb Crap). They get a lot more for a sale than I get for an impression or a pay-4-click, but I’m not trying to demographic you. In fact, most ads served up are responsive to your cookies (har har); i.e., places you’ve been to and expressed some interest in. The ads you see are different from the ones others see.
I don’t give a shit whether the sweet treats you eat are “paleo” or not. This kinda dealing I will simply not abide. I’d rather see random shit served up by Google and others. I laf at my own ads.
Bigger Issue
I have long wanted to change the old banner that served me so well for so long.
Thanks, Justin Owings
Justin Owings was a long time reader from way back prior to 2008 or so when I went to this banner. Similar dumping of religion and politics background. He’s a smart man, now husband and father and last I heard, was sill in the employ of Teh Google. He designed it. About a year or so ago I asked him about another round but he doesn’t need to get $300 for a banner, anymore. Good. I’d have paid $500, but I knew better than to ask.
Among other things, he started and runs Birthday Shoes. Here’s me. And my friend Davis Straub hang gliding in Vibrams.
At times, I obsessed about doing a new banner. Once, I went to A.B. Dada, a cool cat who started and runs 7BuckTees—100% Politically Incorrect T-Shirts. He has designers and was willing to do a freebee for cross promotion. But, I was so muddled that my attempts at putting literally everything into a single banner was so silly, he stopped responding to my emails. Good.
I forgot about it all until a few weeks ago, when I realized that there’s simply no way to convey my thinking over the juxtaposition between wild human animals and caged zoo humans in a single banner. So I got to cropping pics.
Right now, there are exactly 39 banner images with many more to follow. It’s very digital. The image that serves up with each visit or reload either expresses part of my idea of a wild, natural, healthy human existence…or it expresses a caged, zoo’d, trained, made up, mak-ed-up, fake, phony, learned, over-fed, grain-fed, junk-fed, sugar-fed, drugged, dominated, subservient voting human suffering from Stockholm Syndrome—an Earth epidemic.
I never say which is which. That’s part of the fun.
Some are catching on. I initially got confusion. Then, signs that some were getting it. My favorite critique so far was this one:
Richard,
Enjoy your site, but.. does this look like a blog you are proud of ..really?
The Banner, or the Ads?
I wondered if it was the banner. The ads, I’ve explained and if anyone wishes to pay me $2,000 monthly, I’ll take them all off. Month-to-month contract.
Ryan:
Absolutely! That biting the throat is one of my 2-3 favorites in the roughly dozen rotating banner images I have.
Thanks for getting outraged, it’s great validation for me. Like I always say, I’m not happy unless you’re not happy. :)
Onward. Eventually, I’ll have hundreds of images juxtaposing a wild human existence with a tamed, learned, submissive one.
And everybody gets to choose which they envy the most. 1,000 words per visit.
WHAT IT'S ABOUT AND HOW IT WORKS
Free The Animal is an eclectic writing project about everything since November 2003. 23 years, 5,500 posts, 5 million words.
It's a paid membership blog. Most posts are free and public, but only paid members can comment. What determines whether it's free or paid is when I publish. Monday through Friday, free and public. Saturday and Sunday, for paid members. That's it. Membership info here.
But Richard you will now be harming your BRANDING efforts and not giving the customer a smooth consistent concurrent message!!!
Actually I think the new design is a bit ugly, too much spacing, the Free The Animal in plain text, just generally doesn’t feel like it fits together very well. I think you should still get a designer with a more artsy fartsy eye than yours to put everything you have now together but more aesthetically. My 2c (but actually often ugly websites make more money as you can turn some of those bounced visitors into ad clicks instead of them hitting the back button and everyone who likes your shit is going to stick around anyway).
Evolutionarily
Yep, gonna do exactly that once I get all the elements sorted. There are some other problem elements such as small mobile devices not displaying the banner correctly, probably because of the CSS hack I used to get the title and tagline above the banner. On it.
I love the new look. And I also love how the ads are tailored to my likes… doggies, appliances, food, ooh la la. Super happy that you are getting a bit of a pay back (besides the heartfelt stories from those you’ve changed for the good) for all you’ve given over all these years. Darn right you should be proud of your provocatively inspiring, meaty creation!
Like most pages I enjoy reading, I turned AdBlock off on yours some time ago. The ads I see are relevant to me.
Richard,
It was the shitty ads plastered everywhere, not the banner! (Which is cool)
And I have never once searched for life insurance.
Ryan
Ha!
Hey, you made the front page!
Offer still stands, though. I can get my PayPal address. :)
I’m honoured!
How about I use your Amazon link to buy me some Primal Defense SBO and we’ll call it even.
That same company, GOL, just launched what is apparently the first actual food-based Multivitamin (not just synthetics in yeast like all the other “Whole Food” vitamins). You should check it out and give us your thoughts – Kind Organics.
Peace from Canada
Ryan
I didn’t mention it in the post, should have, but most income from the blog is exactly from that, lots of people buying from Amazon using my link.
Really appreciate people going to the trouble.
I fear adverts may devalue the posterity of your blog. Jesus never put ads in the bible (except for a bit of product placement with bread, wine, frankincense, mir and gold) and look – it’s still in publication to this day.
@Jimmy 4 Jesus
Jesus has his priests hustling for money, so he doesn’t need ads.
I read blogs in a feed reader, (feedly, these days) and I noticed that since your redesign in-article images won’t load because you disabled hotlinking. Error of the form:
The owner of this website (freetheanimal.com) does not allow hotlinking to that resource (/images/2014/07/IMG-2553.jpg).
Since you define where the feed is (feedblitz), this may not be intentional (I know some blogs don’t publish whole articles in their feeds, to drive traffic through to the full blog so readers see all their ads).
Hmmm, Joe. I’ll have to look into that. I think I recall a setting for that somewhere. Thanks.
1. i also read it in RSS but i dont’ have any image problem. (FYI i’m using Seamonkey)
2. the header image is random. i like!
3. i don’t see any “in your face” ads nor banner ads. like Ryan so disappointing.
i also dislike those paleo bars/cake/cookies/drinks ads or coupons (Jimmy’s is full of them)
i understand that even gurus have to eat; but
but you might as well sell cooking appliances books, exercise gears, retreats or camps , weapons, music, etc than those processed goodies.
cheers
I think the “popular stories” images/links are misleading because they’re not from Free the Animal. The ads that pop up for me are always the same which is okay with me. Personally, I don’t like the ad right under the blog post title because it’s too intrusive. I’m not “mad” about how you or any blog owner chooses to have ads, but it becomes a tail wagging the dog kind of thing, if that makes any sense. And it seems counterproductive because it makes the company and its product annoying, you know? But hey, maybe the marketeers will realize that eventually.
Energy
Lots of the ads have a little X in the top right corner where you can click and have it not pop up in the future.
I love the changing banners, esp. the one with a shelf full of potato chips – so much resistant starch :-)
I love it…except when I have to see Obama ;)
Love the banners. The potato chip one? I took a pic a couple months ago, at a grocery store I loathe (starts with an ‘S,’ ends with a ‘y,’ and it’s anything but ‘Safe’) of the cereal isle. The whole entire side of one LONG aisle was boxed cereals!!!! Yuk.
I think you might find this a bit funny and even more loathsome. I was in my S…..y, which is located in the MD-DC-VA metropolis. Cruising past the meat counter, I saw several signs proclaiming the meat to be local. Intrigued, I took a look. The meat was all Smithfield product! Smithfield headquarters are in Smithfield, VA, about 3 hours away, so I guess there is some truth. Months later the signs are still there. I have minimized my shopping there since.
To my mind, Wilber, if it’s important to you. Look a farmer/rancher in the eye. Ask questions.
Wilbur, a good place to start: http://www.eatwild.com
Thanks. I do get most of my meat direct from the farmers who raise the animals when I can. Otherwise I get responsibly raised meat (Niman Ranch, Piedmont Ridge, etc.). I do, however, occasionally need to venture into a grocery store for things like bananas and cheese (grass fed, which S…..y has). That’s when I saw the local signs put out for meat that I consider to be the antithesis of local. I thought it was swarmy and underhanded.
Wilbur, good word for it, swarmy…… didn’t know they had grass-fed cheese!
Mine has it in the deli area. Don’t know whether all do. Found KerryGold cheddar there, which is quite tasty and from grass fed cows.
Thanks!
I keep getting ads for really ugly shoes. Not all vegan, cat-loving knitters are lesbians, Mr. Google. The stereotyping is not appreciated.
Laf, Gina.
Seriously, I laf at the ads I get served up since I’m always all over the place. Interesting what happens when you do housecleaning on cookies.
I have and ad blocker so I was not aware of the ads, but now that I am , I”m so pissed off.
As for the banner it’s your fucking banner, I didn’t come here for the banner I came to get a differing view point.
The new look is growing on me.
Glad to see that the tagline is still evolving. I think you are getting closer to the essence.
A word to the wise though, you are a better poet than I am if you can get the word juxtaposing to sound right.
(I am an upper-intermediate level poet according to the Federal Bureau of Poetry an Patriotism, and therefore have the authority to criticize over 56 percent of the population, roughly speaking.)
How about this for a tagline?
— Criticizing over 56 percent of the population, roughly speaking, since 2003.
Ha!
I think we have a winner.
I don’t mind the ad’s, and the idea of different images is pretty novel. But I would recommend not to put any ad’s directly under the subject heading. And don’t put big ad’s in the blog text, they break up the flow of the text to much, A small ad in the is fine. Other than that I think it is a smart move, if you want to keep doing this you need some reward for your effort.
come to think about it: google is not a company, it’s a cult (see its mission statement)
Thumbs up on the new design. I like the banner pic of the xmas shoppers. Reminds me of the great song by Root Boy Slim “Christmas at KMart”
no need to apologize for monetizing but i find google to be a loathsome company. “do no evil” (unless you can make billions!!)
Amen, google is loathsome;
their services & “products” are mediocre
Do No Evil my ass
i’m trying to purge google out of my life
Well, I’ll be the negative nancy and say I liked the old header / theme a lot better.
The site had consistent, nice, clean branding.
Now it looks / feels more like a generic wordpress site.
Prob a dumb idea but why don’t you put out a product to make money? Like for instance a “broad-spectrum prebiotic” that combines many of the different guar gums, inulin, glucomannan, arabinogalactan, FOS, acacia, green plantain flour, etc etc in very small small amounts so that folks could try the best ones (for maybe $20 or so for a month’s supply?) without having to buy 5 or 10 different ones all at once. As far as i can tell there is currently no product available like this in the mktplace.
Elmo, it has not been not thought of. There are people looking into this.
However, my only interest is in branding for a royalty. I have zero interest in having a product where I have to manage supply chain, manufacturing, marketing, distribution, fulfillment and customer service.
At 53, Im very over buying myself jobs.
Richard,
Out of curiosity – do you find blogging to be worth it in terms of the income you make?
I’m a pharmacist and am constantly asked about supplements, diets, yada, yada. You see all these people touting making money online but sense you have experience in real business as well I’d love to hear your feedback.
Best,
Curtis
Not unless it wasn’t just a side income stream and I didn’t see it as more than a passion. Takes a lot of work, a lot of time, unless you have serious capital to invest to get yourself off the ground and have people visiting your place.. Just like anything else.