Everyone wants free money. Getting something we want with zero effort and zero commitment cannot be beat. Which is why, I think, the whole blogging for money craze took off in the first place. Everyone loves sharing their opinions. Getting paid to do something you love can’t really be called work.
Sometimes, it is.
Sometimes, you just don’t feel like writing to feed the search engine monsters. With that in mind, I can understand why people scrape feeds and repost the content as their own. At the end of the day, we money-bloggers just want people to click our ads. Wouldn’t it be nice if our Web site could just be one gigantic ad? How convenient would it be if the sole purpose of our site was to sell Adsense links? Heap Media seems to have found a way to do that with Blackle.
Blackle is the black version of Google. Actually, it is Google, just without the sidebar links and dressed in black. What Heap Media has done is taken the Adsense for Search tool (like the one I have at the top of my page) and fitted it look similar to Google’s homepage. When you search using Blackle (or my site), if you click any of the premium (above the line) links, the site you searched from gets some cash. Therefore, the whole point of Blackle is for users to search Google…in black. Blackle is just one giant Google ad unit. The site requires no updating and no maintenance. It’s everything money-bloggers are looking for!
Of course Blackle has to give you some incentive for using them over Google. If you read the About Us section, you get to read some hogwash about how CRT monitors consume less energy when displaying a dark screen. Therefore, if more people used Blackle, they could be saving the world a significant amount of wasted energy. Capitalizing off people’s good nature is awesome! I wish I had thought of it first.
The energy savings is marginal, but, “Every bit counts,” Blackle claims. Though I wonder if they’re talking about energy savings.