Monetization: "Google Blogger" would like its bloggers to link to Amazon

.

Generally speaking, the experience of blogging (for Google; yes, this is sponsored by Google) has been a rewarding and fruitful experience.  Google has raised to a fine art --and in most ways, an objective and non-intrusive one-- the technique of gathering information about those who browse pages.

Anyone who has uploaded videos to YouTube --another operation that is related to Google-- knows at least some aspects of the statistical information that Google collects.  They give you summary details about those who watch YouTube videos:

1. Their gender.  (Obviously YouTubers are not required to be honest when they give this information when they "join" YouTube.)
2. Their country of location.  (Again, YouTube must rely on their members to provide this information accurately.)
3. Their age.
4. At what point in the video they stopped watching.  This is a measure of how interesting the video is, and how interesting a particular point in the video is.
5. How they found your link; e.g. from an outside page (and when did this pattern start?), from another video, though their internal linking; through searching for a particular string using YouTube search, etc.

They also provide a graph of how many "hits" your video has received over time.

Other websites, e.g. the one that does the counter for this blog, also report (*) What operating system you're using [e.g. Windows, Unix, MacIntosh], (*) What browser you're using [e.g. Internet Explorer or Firefox or Safari, etc etc]; in short, things that would interest a software developer --which I'm not.

Lovely, though all this is, and despite the fact that I do review books and stuff on Amazon, thus far I have been an independent reviewer, not obliged to Amazon very much, except that a couple of years ago I consented to be a Vine Voice, which meant that I was permitted a few free books to review, in exchange for reviews of those books.  I have ordered a half dozen books (of which I really liked four) on that program, but now I have this blog, and Amazon is unhappy at losing their reviewer, and Google is eager to make some money out of my reviews for Amazon!  If I sign up for this program, I could get a portion of whatever money Amazon gives Google for sending customers their way via these blogs.  But readers would --justifiably-- suspect that the money I make out of the deal might bias my reviews.

What I would like is a non-monetized relationship with Amazon.  If I happen to give a favorable review to some book or piece of equipment, I would like to provide an easy link to that item on Amazon (and there's really nothing to stop me, even now); if I happen to give an unfavorable review, there is no need to provide a link.  So I guess that answers my own question; just leave things the way they are.

Independent Bookstores : a dying breed
At this point, I would like to make a pitch for your friendly neighborhood bookstore.

The big lesson that Wall Street and its endless tentacles have taught entrepreneurs is that starting small is a mugs game if you're going to stay small.

I was addicted to a game on FaceBook called Cafe World.  You cooked meals, and little figures (who represented your fb friends whom you "hired" --quite unbeknownst to them, I should add) served the food, and you made money.  Unless you expanded your operation, you were stuck with a few boring dishes, e.g. cheeseburgers.  Furthermore, you had to constantly revisit Cafe World to keep cooking for your customers.  This pressure to keep expanding was an artificial echo of the real-world pressure to expand.

Oddly enough, expanding does not always make sense in the restaurant business.  Many restaurants are successful precisely because they're small.  For instance, I knew a couple of restaurants, essentially sports bars, that were highly profitable.  They expanded one of their locations by taking over several square feet from their neighbors, but their sales plummeted.  Is there a lesson here?  I think so.

All across the country, the small independent restaurant feels pressure to link up to some giant franchise.  The franchise provides standardized food offerings, in return for the franchise presence in that locality; e.g. a small hot-dog bar in a remote village becomes a new McDonald's.  Hamburgers and fries are trucked in at regular intervals, obviating the need to obtain them from local suppliers.

The same thing is happening to bookstores.  I can only speak to what is happening here in my town.  There were a couple of bookstores, but they've mostly all gone out of business, except for one that specializes in comics.  The sole survivor in town must now compete with the giant Border's out at the suburban mall.

Does Borders provide a service that the small independent bookseller cannot?  Yes.  They stock DVDs and CDs, both of which are tricky and specialized sorts of merchandise for a bookseller to sell.  Furthermore, teenagers and 20-somethings who buy such things do tend to shop at the mall, rather than downtown.  However, I like to support the smaller bookseller for several reasons.

• The downtown area needs support.  If most of the interesting retailers quit downtown, it becomes the stomping grounds of addicts and vandals, in turn discouraging ordinary people from occupying the area in the evenings.
• The smaller bookstore enables one to browse, in the original sense of the term.  You can easily find --at a reasonable price-- something you were not expecting at all.  Browsing in a large Book Mall requires you to decide what genre you're interested in, and then browse withing the several hundred square feet devoted to that genre.  You can also look at the stuff on the discount tables, I suppose.  But the discount tables at the big mall bookstore are pathetically limited both in variety and value.
• The local bookstore provides a living for adults supporting families, in contrast to the the mall bookstore that employs much younger workers.  In my stage of life, I sympathize more with the aging professional than the younger seasonal worker.
• The workers at the local bookstore are amazingly knowledgeable about the books in the store.  The workers at the mall store are hard put to know where particular items are, and how their software works in locating these things; knowing anything about the items themselves takes an understandable back seat, unless they're among the 20 or so top-selling items at any given time.
• The profits of the smaller bookstore stay in town, whereas the profits of the big mall bookstore are spread out among starving millionaires around the country.  (OK, many of these people barely scrape together an annual before-taxes income of $200,000, but as one who earns less than a third of that, my sympathies are with the locally owned bookstore.)

One can easily argue that I'm talking about sticking a finger in the dyke.  But this is not necessarily the case.  The economies of scale are not entirely what they are held up to be.  It is the economies of scale that require enormous trucks to be polluting our highways, causing traffic accidents.  It is the economies of scale that require small schools to be shut down, and school districts to be amalgamated.  Airlines merge; cellphone companies eat each other up, provide slightly better service at higher rates, and fire hundreds of workers.  Economies of scale allow banks to consolidate bad loans, and take unjustified risks on under-estimating just how bad the loans are.

Meanwhile, many franchise restaurants decide to give up their affiliations.  For instance you occasionally see a sign such as "king Donut", and you wonder whether those white spots to the left used to be "Dun".  Similarly for Perky's (formerly Perkins?), and so on.  For franchise restaurants, the issues are rather extreme: you surrender a lot of control when you align yourself to a franchise.  For bookstores, the issues are less clear cut.

In principle, it should be possible to create a bookstore chain that permits a lot of local control, in exchange for a relatively small share of their profits.  However, once a franchise goes public (or since franchises are usually public anyway), the insatiable stockholders keep demanding higher dividends, and workers and the customers become secondary players.

So support your local bookstore.  Amazon books are priced so low that they are irresistible.  But it is a scary thought that Amazon might become someday the only game in town.

Arch