The begrudging Is Obviously a thing…

So the GloucesterClam – www.gloucesterclam.com went to a self hosted format and they made the unthinkable mistake of asking for what amounts to a pittance of a donation to help with costs associated with maintaining their site.

In the short time since I posted it I’ve gotten three remarks about the Clam having an ad on the site and asking for a donation as if they had just lit their children on fire and tossed them into a dumpster.

Here’s the post from the Clam-

The Clam Gets a Facelift

By KT Toomey November 10, 2014 Uncategorized

You will notice that the website has totally changed over the weekend. If you didn’t notice, you should probably feel shame in many places around your body.

We decided to do this for a bunch of reasons – better content options, better layout, plugins that can help us track you to the nearest streetcorner, the ability to add a store to sell you stickers and shirts – stuff like that. Our free options were totally limiting us, maaan. We needed freedom, baby, and we had to go get it.

So because that migration and subsequent dozen small frustrating issues took up the majority of my weekend (also I had to make several trips to Dogtown to dump leaves and brush just like everyone else in town), I have no real content to post today. But look, our site is pretty! And it’ll continue to look even better in the next few weeks as we make a few more little changes. Make sure you let us know if you have problems commenting or viewing anything. Unless your comment is terrible, in which case don’t. And be sure to let us know if you like it, or if there’s something else you want to see.

We just added a new feature- you can subscribe to our email list on our sidebar, so you know when we’re doing Clam nights or other events, and you can keep up with the latest in ClamLand. We aren’t going to sell your email to the Russians. Probably.

And now I’m going to make today’s content-less post EVEN WORSE for you. Here we go: the Clam is a labor of love for us, but it does cost us some money for upkeep. We bring you original, sometimes funny content on a daily basis – sometimes we stay up way past our bedtimes to figure out what will make you laugh tomorrow.

It’s been almost 6 months of hard, but fun, work on this blog, and we hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as we have. If you love us, and want to keep us going as long as possible, donate to us using the Paypal button on the left. Even $5 is a huge help to offset stuff like hosting, Clam nights, the gas we use driving around to take pictures that barely relate to our posts, beer to get through Wicked Tuna recaps, and the hush money we paid Marty after he accidentally droned over KT’s top-secret sexy ladyrobot lab.

and here’s the one ad displayed in the sidebar of www.gloucesterclam.com –

 

So for me to get three comments in such a short amount of time about a tiny ad and the audacity the Clammers had in asking for a donation on their blog, it tells me that it’s definitely a thing.   Not that I didn’t know that there are many many people out there that would begrudge them for asking.  I get it completely.  When my dad or other people couldn’t comprehend why I would do GMG without selling ad space or posting all the community announcements and not asking anything in return I felt and still feel that I got back way more in friendships and appreciation than I could ever make up for with the utter disgust that people who feel entitled to free content obviously feel every single day when you ask them for money for your hard work.

I don’t know why people are the way they are but it’s so very obvious that there is a huge contingency of people that think that content on the web should always be free and if you have the audacity to ask people to help cover the costs of maintaining the site that provides that content then you are just a greedy “out-to-make-money” son of a bitch.

I don’t begrudge the Clammers asking for money and I wouldn’t begrudge the Clammers if their site became so popular that the Huffington Post decided to buy them out and made millionaires out of them.  If you like the content and have the means, I suggest you donate to them.  if you have the means but don’t feel like donating, then don’t.  Just don’t bitch about a mere suggestion that you could donate if you’d like.

If it bothers you so much to have to scroll past an ad on their site or to have to read a post where they ask for a donation then I suggest you re-examine the work you do for a living and how you would feel if someone told you that you really ought to do it for free.

They’re not doing it “for-the-money” trust me.  No successful blog is written “for-the-money”.  You have to have major league passion about a subject because there’s only about a bazillion other blogs or sites people could visit for free written by people that are passionate about that subject matter.  No one writing for money and given assignments could ever deliver the quality of material that someone who is passionate about a subject could over time.