"Do I Still Get Paid?"

You, kind sir or madam, could be making money while reading this.

Not from me, obviously. You can’t really expect to earn money from people who don’t have any to begin with. But Google, which owns Blogspot, could indeed be paying you money – and maybe even me money – even though I’m technically not a big revenue generator and you’re reading all of this for free.

Luke Dormehl, writing at digitaltrends.com, seems to think so.

I have no idea who he is, or what his expertise on the subject might be. He could indeed be a writing robot, soon to doom dorks like me into unpaid oblivion for providing free content for Google’s search-bots to . . . nevermind. That’s where I’m at already.

But Google (and I keep saying Google, but it's ANYBODY out there on the Internet: Facebook, blah blah and all) is getting something out of both of us. I’m providing content, marginally valuable as it is. And you, by reading said contact, clicking on said links, are providing some kind of data that Google somehow can alchemically convert into revenue.

So why don’t we get a micro-slice of that, Dormehl argues.

To answer: I dunno.

To answer in a longer way: We’re not Google or whoever is busily scraping that data away, so neener neener to us.

If data is the new oil, what grade are we?

As a content producer, I’m probably in the OPEC grade, though I’m staggeringly behind in producing the quantity needed to fully consider myself such a producer.

As a consumer, it’s a wildcatter’s guess as to where I fall on the grade level. Same for you. But since consumers far outnumber producers, it’s fair game Google and others are still making money selling whatever miniscule bits of data we provide, simply because we’re in a wide, deep pool of data producers.

What kind of a micropayment – and by micropayment, you have to imagine pennies cut to the atomic level is my assumption – are we worth? I don’t know.

There are people making some pretty good educated guesses, though.

So if you’re sick and looking to buy a car, you’re probably worth something. But you ain’t gonna find that kind of advice on this blog. So shoo. If you’re surrendering your data, may as well get something for it.