Don’t use The News Room to monetize your blog. Please!
I keep coming across blogs that use The News Room as a way for monetizing. Don’t do it. The News Room, while offering a potentially decent amount of money, creates an ungodly experience for your readers, particularly if its services are overused. The way The News Room works is that you browse news stories (text, videos and images) and “mash” them, which means you grab the code and stick the story on your blog in a post.
The News Room offers $4 per thousand views of a video feed, $3 for a video story, and $1 for a text story or image. For sites you’ve referred, you get $1 per thousands views of a video feed and 50 cents for everything else. Not bad, but the news stories are so ugly and make a blog look hideous. They don’t blend with anything in a template and make your site look cheap.
The screenshot above is of a blog that has “mashed” a The News Room text story. You can see how ugly it is, and notice how on my laptop screen the story is wider than the space designated for blog posts. What do you think your readers will think when they see that? The videos are even worse, often starting on their own accord and taking time to load, which is frustrating for people like me who are on a slow Internet connections.
Here is an example of a video news story.
Not the prettiest thing is it. Using The News Room to monetize your blog is like spending $100 on a car shine and then driving through a football field in the rain. Am I off the mark? Is The News Room really not that bad? Tell me what you think. It is not a service I will ever utilize though.
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4 Responses to “Don’t use The News Room to monetize your blog. Please!”
I’m still a bit undecided on this. I use The News Room on one of my blogs, because it combines free content and ads. I’m trying it out to see if it’s worth it. Had to decrease th number of posts on front page to speed up loading, though.
I can see the bad sides it has, but I’m not convinced until I’ve tried it out enough.
i think if used sparingly then there could be scope. I’ll check your blog out and see what’s up. But I’ve been running into increasing numbers of blogs that throw up far too many stories and videos. :et me know how you get on with it, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.
I think they might be great…they’ve obviously got beau coup money to pay us bloggers.
I just received a full-color postcard from them today.
I’m eager to see my updated earnings, though. I haven’t used them that much for the reasons you describe, but I just uploaded a video on this blog:
http://thisblogisformypics.blogspot.com
Let me know how it looks and loads on your laptop.
Are you using Firefox browser?
Anyway, I think they can be a great addition to monetizing your blog.
And by the way — you can turn off the auto-play feature on videos, which is what I do before I load the videos to my blog as a courtesy to my readers.
Happy blogging,
Paula
I’m not on my laptop right now but your blog does look better than some of the others I’ve seen, mostly because you have a cleaner layout. I think that can help considerably. Let me know how much you start making with this would you. I’d be interested to hear.