Heather B. Armstrong, full-time blogger and former web designer, is experimenting with a new way to make online revenue: publishing the hate mail she receives on a separate page of her blog, surrounded by advertising.
Armstrong set up Dooce.com in 2001, and since then it has rather grown: the site’s advertising sign-up section reports over 220,000 page views and over 30,000 unique users per day. Armstrong says that she now earns enough money from the website to support her whole family which includes a husband, two dogs and two children. On Twitter (@dooce) she is – at the time of writing – followed by 1,275,573 people.
With that popularity comes a lot of vitriol. Introducing the new ‘monetising the hate’ feature – an idea suggested by her friend Heather Champ, Armstrong wrote:
“Every awful thing you can say about a human being, it’s been said about me and my family. Over and over again, like a broken record, and I guess with the intention that it will at some point hurt me so badly that I will throw my hands in the air and give up.”
(…)
“Internet, let me introduce you to Monetizing The Hate. Here I will be posting all the hate mail I get in my inbox and all the hateful anonymous and not-so-anonymous comments left on this website.”
Hat-tip: Paul Waugh, London Evening Standard.
Actually, from what I understand, it’s not hatemail Dooce actually receives. Initially I thought the same thing, but when I noticed the comments were about Dooce and not people speaking to her, I digged deeper. As it turns out they’re comments that Dooce copies and pastes. The original comments are posted to another website: pooponpeeps.
Some people have way too much time on their hands, I guess. Those people for the hate comments and Dooce for finding them online, copying & pasting them and adding them to her site. In some sort of bizarre way, they make a great team together.