There’s an intriguing title for you eh? It’s a little award that Ted, CEO of PayPerPost, the blog marketing people, likes to nominate people for, who knock the service without being in possession of the full facts. People like Jason Calacanis who slag PPP off left, right and centre, yet has made a lot of cash out of advertising*, while all he can blog about is how many minutes he’s spent running this month - well, I’m humbled, how about you?
It’s a fact that just about every post I’ve seen saying PPP is a bad thing, comes from a blogger with a massive audience, which results in monthly cheques from Google Adsense to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars! Yeah, fat boys, you lap up the dollars as fast as you can, but no-one else is allowed to? I don’t have a massive readership, I may never get one. My adsense earnings were so pathetic I got rid of them from here, and may drop them off Blog-Op, ‘cos they’re just cluttering the place up. In less than a month with PPP I’ve made 40 (forty!) times what adsense has made me in 5 months, and I couldn’t be happier with it. I feel my paid posts are getting better, and giving more value to the advertisers who are paying me, and it’s also inducing me to write more and better posts, I feel my blog is better because of them. This blog may never go ‘A-list’ but it pays the bills for me to start other ad-free blogs that’s for sure.
So, who would I give The Golden Donkey to? Everyone who says small bloggers aren’t allowed to earn money on their own initiative. People like the aforementioned Calacanis who made $120,000 a month out of Adsense. Maybe when he gives some of that back to his readers who made him the money, he can lecture the rest of us on how immoral we are, for polluting the blogosphere, but until then…
This is a paid post, and proudly so 
[*Corrected to reflect comments]
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Couple of facts wrong here:
1. I never made $120,000 a month on Google Adsense with my blog. Maybe you’re mistaking the blogs that were part of my company Weblogs, Inc. (like Joystiq, TVSquad, Engadget, Cinematical, Autoblog, etc)?
2. I have no ads on my blog. Zero. Perhaps you think the ThisNext shopcaster is an ad? It’s not, but rather just products I like or don’t like… I get paid nothing for putting them on thisnext.
1. Fair enough, but I didn’t say that it was from your blog - you still made a lot of cash out of ads & good luck to you-let me make some this way, all of my posts are fully disclosed.
2. Fair enough Hands up to that one.
I agree that undisclosed paid posts are a bad thing, but wishing PPP to fail, which would put a lot of people out of work, and cut a source of income for thousands of people around the world is just a bit spiteful to my way of thinking. Make them better yes, but crash & burn? No, I’m glad you made that cash, and I hope you’re making lots more-adsense sucks for me & I use adblockers so I don’t see other peoples (someone say hypocrite?)but I don’t wish it to fail for all that.
Thanks for visiting
Good for you Chris!
I use PPP too and disclose all my paid posts. I wonder if sometimes people like Jason aren’t “controversial” just to drum up even more traffic. I have made $2 on AdSense, and after about a month on PPP I have made over $250. Jason, maybe you would like to come to my blog and click on a few ads so I can make some AdSense money? 
LOL. Thats a good one.
Ooh I call wooden spoon!!
meh, its a free net. If a blogger wants to turn their blog into a neverending series of adds thats their perogative. If someone doesn’t like it, just don’t visit the blog in question. Thats my philosophy. Yours is one of the few blogs I visit that makes (disclosed) paid posts. But you’ve got enough other content that keeps me coming back. i just ignore anything I’m not interested in and read the posts I am interested in, paid or otherwise.
Thanks Rav’N, thats what I aim for. Never allow the paid posts to outnumber the ‘normal ones’ and I also try to do a good job with the paid ones - I have actually found a lot of them quite interesting in their own right.
Well here’s a little update: Seems like ol’ Jason wasn’t quite telling the whole truth.
The ‘ThisNext shopcaster’ is showing products for a company owned by one of Jasons friends, in which the big C is a boardmember and stockholder. So while he may not get paid for the ads, if someone buys something off them he benefits. Way to go on full disclosure Jason:
Source: The PPP blog which has an excellent photo of Jason
Wow, $120,000 a month is a good money
$120,000 a month? From clicks?
I’m jealous, I’m envious, but… most of all, I’m skeptical.
Even if someone has sufficient traffic to make it theoretically possible — can all of his readers click on his ads all the time? Who does that? (There’s a Sunday poll question for Blog-Op: Have you ever clicked on an ad — once? 2-5 x? 5-10? Most times you stop? Always?
Although you probably would have to ditch Adsense before you ran such a poll lest you violate TOS.
And, yes, I know, page views alone factor in… but not a lot… not unless you have about a gazillion page views, right?
I’d put one of the little dots in here to emphasize my point… but I can’t figure out which one would fit best.
This one?
I can believe the figure, and I’ve seen bigger. I’m not entirely sure, but I think you can get paid by impression with Adsense (CPM?) so if you get a click on your website that get 50 pageviews a month it’s worth a cent, whereas the same ad shown on a website that gets a million pageviews gets 50 cents for a single click. May not be that much money, but you get the idea.