So Did I Win? Already?

Not a sample, folks. This is the only post for the entire month!

Back in February I discovered that Watcher of the Dawn, a website previously dedicated to snarking on the various Golden Dawn orders, seemed as if it were trying to become the new Augoeides, putting up a whole bunch of posts about various news stories that touched on the paranormal - you know, just like I do! I was coming off a very slow January, in which I started a new job and had only had time to put up four posts, so I wondered if they might be trying to take advantage of the slack.

By the end of February I had the posting frequency back to where it was, and added more actual magick commentary to up my game a bit. Watcher out-posted me in February and March, but then April came around. Watchers put up one post. For this month they haven't put up any. Meanwhile I put up sixteen in April and this one will make it fourteen for May. So, I guess, it looks like I won without much of a fight. I'm still here and posting. Watcher seems to have mostly given up, and returned to snarking on initiatory groups if the April post is any indication.

So what happened? When you look up the site on Google, the tagline for Watcher says "the world's first New Age tabloid." I beg to disagree. Augoeides has been a New Age tabloid since 2007 at the latest, which was nine years ago. World's first? Try Johnny-come-lately. When I dug into what was going on with Watcher, it sounded like somebody had decided to try and monetize it in some fashion - which is weird, because I didn't see ads or anything on the site. I don't know how they were expecting that to work.

Now to be fair, ads don't work. Back in the day when I was still experimenting, I tried putting some Google ads up on Augoeides. It was a long time ago, so unless you are a longtime reader you probably never saw them. Google had a ten dollar threshold before they would send you any payments, and it took me two years to get above $9. Then Google changed the program and I never got paid, so they essentially stole my $9. That's why you'll never see any more ads from those clowns around here.


What did work for a while was Amazon affiliate links. I would review books and link to them, and also had my own books plugged into my account. So if you clicked over to look at one of my books and bought anything on Amazon after that I still would get a small cut, even if you didn't actually buy my books. But thanks to a conflict between Amazon and the Minnesota state legislature, Amazon stopped the program in my state and several others.

It was good while it lasted, though. It cleared $8 to $10 per month.

Are you starting to get the idea? Occult blogging doesn't pay for shit. The fact that I was happy to be getting $8 to $10 per month instead of $5 per year should drive that point home. I don't do Augoeides for money. If I did, I would have closed it down long ago. I do Augoeides because I'm legitimately interested in all the weird crap I come across, and my readers seem to be as well.

Trying to turn a blog, even one with higher traffic than mine, into a "New Age Tabloid" that could make any significant amount of money is totally doomed. I would really like to know who the idiot was that convinced Watcher it was even possible. Nobody wants to pay for any of this stuff, or even look at ads. They want it all to be free. So that's what I do here, publish stuff I like and find interesting for free.

Don't get me wrong, if the winds someday change and I can get paid for this that would be great. But I'm not holding my breath, and besides I make a good enough living programming computers that you'll never see me begging on Facebook or anything like that. I've used my magical and technical skills to build a great career, and that provides me with the luxury of being able to run Augoeides as essentially a hobby.

I don't have any idea if Watcher invested any serious money in their attempt to ramp up their site. I hope they didn't, because that money was essentially flushed down a hole. Furthermore, all they needed to do was ask people like me if we made any money off our sites, and then they would have known the truth. You can make a little - this site still sells some of my books, and the Amazon thing was nice for what it was. But you're not going to make a lot with this sort of material. No way, no how.

Now the nice thing about all this is that I've been encouraged by the traffic produced by my Monday magick posts, so I'm going to keep doing those along with my usual "New Age Tabloid" stuff. I have another new ritual on deck for tomorrow, and the weird news keeps coming. As long as it's out there and people like you keep reading it, I'll keep putting it up here on Augoeides. Thank you all for your support!