Day 63. 64 pages, 30,172 words.

I’m considering levelling up the blog again. They’re offering me a slight discount, so two years of premium would cost €120 instead of €180. I feel a bit wealthy right now, but I’m just not sure if I need premium. Premium offers another 7 GB of storage but I’m not a third of the way to filling my standard 6 GB yet; they offer cool social media and video support which might be neat to try out; and they remove the banners and ads (which I haven’t noticed anyway – have you?) and provide the chance to pick my own ads, thus earning revenue somehow. Not sure. Ad space earns money for WordPress, obviously. WordPress loses that to me if I go premium, in return for that sweet €120-over-two-years score. And I make whatever I make from monetising the Hatstand. It would almost certainly be less than €120 over two years, because otherwise WordPress probably wouldn’t offer it and it’s not like this blog does a huge amount of traffic. I have a couple of hundred subscribers, three people who comment regularly and a few Likers who only show up when I use a specific set of tags so I’m pretty sure they’re bots.

The question is, do I want to monetise the Hatstand? I mean don’t get me wrong, I don’t think my principles stand in the way of making a buck. Selling out is very much my bag, baby. And I’m already providing advertisers with revenue apparently, even if I don’t see much of the ads.

I doubt I’d even break even on ad revenue vs. hosting costs, but it might soften the blow a little? Or maybe it would be better to just think of it as a premium ad-less offering for my readers, and take the other cool features that the price tag includes. It’s not ultimately a huge hit on my bank balance … and yet my brain is telling me, quite correctly, that it’s just the same sort of frivolous money-burning I always do when I end up with extra cash in my account. This is how capitalism works.

Let me know what you think about the idea. And as always, Like Share and Subscribe?