So you want to start selling advertising on your blog or website?

There's always Google AdSense, which doesn't pay all that much. And there is NO customer service. I had a client blackballed from the service for doing something I KNOW they didn't do, and there is no recourse.

But looking around, it appears that you can do this outside of Google and make a lot more money.

Michael Hyatt says if you have 10,000 unique visitors per month, you can make it happen. And it looks like he used the Boston-based BuySellAds platform to help him do it.

Things he did included:

• Launching a reader survey
• Setting up an advertising page
• Creating an "advertising kit"
• Signing up with an advertising service (again, he used BuySellAds) Then capping it with:
• Pitching an irresistible offer

If self-help and career/life coaching is your thing, MichaelHyatt.com is all about that. He also offers a podcast and a bunch of products like e-books, print books, audio books and even a WordPress theme.

Not having spent a lot of time at his site, I imagine that Michael thinks of a blog as part of the overall marketing/monetization strategy in your life (or your business' life, I suppose).

Does this blog have 10,000 unique visitors per month?

Even I was asking that question after reading this. The purpose of this blog isn't direct monetization (or its content would be a whole lot different instead of "whatever the hell I'm thinking about" and "here's what I'm putting on social media").

I don't really pay much attention to the traffic. I don't even have a "real" analytics setup. I just rely on the AwStats functionality that my web host bakes into my account.

I usually get between 4,000 and 7,000 uniques per month, but I host a few other things on the stevenrosenberg.net domain, and I had a huge spike in November 2015, doubling the number of uniques to 14,000.

It turns out the spike was due to Los Angeles County election results that I host here for my employer. I should definitely move those to a company server, and I actually do have one now that can handle it (it's all Bash scripts, chewing gum and super glue). For the next election, I will.

I'm not saying I will never sell advertising on my "personal" blog, but I don't see it happening. I might do it if I started one or more "specialty" blogs that had some focus, but this isn't that blog.

The Hulu video service -- which really, really wants you to pay them money instead of watching for free -- is not easy to watch in Linux.

They require the HAL library, something Linux hasn't used in years.

There are plenty of tutorials on how to get Hulu working in Ubuntu, but fewer for Fedora.

It's pretty easy to get it so you can watch Hulu in Fedora (version 22 in my case).

You do this:

• Install the fakehal package available here
• Use Firefox to watch Hulu -- Chrome still won't work

It's as easy as that. Video quality was good on Firefox. Now that I can watch Hulu successfully in Fedora, I am more inclined to subscribe.

Netflix: While Netflix doesn't have this problem, on Linux you have to watch in Chrome and not Firefox. Call it #confusing.

Do search and social-media links to content tucked behind paywalls represent a form of bait-and-switch, "tricking" users of those services into clicking links for content they cannot see without a subscription or paying a one-time fee?

Do words like (nonfree), (fee to read) or (subscribers only) make it more acceptable to promote non-universally available content via search engines like Google and social-media sites like Twitter and Facebook?

My quick answer is that creators of content are able to use the "open" Internet network to distribute their content and restrict access via software. It's a form of privacy.

But I do not like when links to that content appear on my social-media feeds without a warning that the content isn't accessible with payment. Give me an appropriate warning about the nature of the transaction ($ for content) and I can decide whether to click, ignore or remove from my feed altogether.