Blogging isn’t a well paid game.
In fact, when you factor in the time involved, it’s probably some of the worst paid work that a person in the Western world can do.
I don’t expect you to be getting out your sympathy violin for us. That’s not necessary – we’re in this for the love of writing about small-sided football, it’s not about the money.
But everyone has got to eat, and this website does make some sources of money – not least to cover its costs. We want this site to be completely open an honest about how it does that, so you know you can always trust us. And if you really feel that you need to restrict us making miniscule amounts of cash from the small portion of traffic that you generate, that’s totally up to you. Your readership is more important to us than money.
Here are the ways this site makes money:
1) Paid advertising
You can see that adverts run on this site around the sides of the articles. Many sites out there these days include adverts within the body of the article text.
We’re proud not to be one of them. We could definitely make more money by placing adverts in the article text, but we’d rather you enjoyed our articles without this hassle.
Our advertising is mainly run through Google Adsense (who generally pay us each time an advert is clicked – a few pennies, woohoo!) but also includes carefully chosen privately run adverts. Even where we have Google Adsense running, we have attempted to stop any adverts appearing that we think are immoral or distasteful (but sadly, we don’t get to check every single advert).
2) Affiliate links
These are common in the blogging world. Essentially it’s where a page links to the location where you can buy a product and then, if a person clicks on it and buys it, the referer gets a small fee (and we’re talking a very low percentage of the sale, in most cases). To be clear, this never impacts the price a person will pay for the product – you’d pay exactly the same price as if you’d found the product yourself.
From 2016 onwards we took the decision that we would put a star (*) on each link that was an affiliate link. Few websites do this, but we want to be totally transparent with you. Whilst we can’t guarantee that each affiliate link before this date is marked with a *, most of them after this date should be. So, for example, if we found an example of an awesome portable bluetooth speaker on Amazon*, you’d see it marked up like that if it was an affiliate link.
FYI – as at January 2016, affiliate links formed a very small portion of revenue for this site (we’re talking less than the price of a couple of sports drinks).
3) Book sales
We wrote a book, did we mention that a hundred times already?
Most of the cost of that book goes to the sellers (e.g. Amazon), the costs of printing it (in glorious hardback) or the publishers (who are awesome and deserve every penny for their work). A small portion of it also comes to us.
If you want to buy it, please do so (and thanks in advance). If you don’t, that’s also fine with us. 🙂
Ways we DO NOT make money through this site
The following are not ways we want to make any money through this site – we think this would be a massive breach of your trust:
- Passing on email addresses to other parties (when you sign up for our email list, we commit NEVER to let anyone else have your email)
- Recommending things we don’t truly think are good.
- Doing product reviews where we have either been given free products, or been paid for that review, without disclosing that fact.
- Selling our kidneys – though that’s more that we value our vital organs, not because you’d be mad at us.
Anything else – just ask
This is designed to be a totally frank and honest description of the site, so you, as a consumer of it know exactly where you stand. Few other blogs give you this kind of transparency.
If there’s something you still want to know then please get in touch and we’ll do our best to answer it.
Thanks for supporting the site, in any way that you do.