ABDPBT

There’s no real reason for this post except to say that LL has her first Lakers jersey.

Except, it’s really a crawler, but you don’t really refer to things like a baby’s “first Lakers crawler.”

The number is Pau Gasol’s, and this is not accidental but it’s also not what would be my first choice. (It is definitely not Mr. Right-Click’s first choice, either, since he refers to Gasol alternately as being such a “weak Euro” or “YES! OLE PAELLA!” depending on his mood and how well Gasol is playing that night.) The thing is, they only make kids and baby jerseys in a few players’ numbers, and I refuse to allow my child to wear a Kobe Bryant jersey until he/she is old enough to request it specifically. My feelings on Kobe Bryant are complex and I need not go into them at length here, suffice to say that, while I immensely respect his basketball skills I have questions about his character that preclude me from having my children wear his number without problematizing the matter a bit.

Which brings me to Mini, who is now old enough to ask for the Kobe jersey and indeed has done so. Now, I could have gone into the problems I have with this but this would involve me discussing things with Mini that he is light years away from understanding or even roughly conceptualizing. So instead I grudgingly accepted this fate as I had agreed to do so many years ago. I still wince whenever I hear him shooting baskets with his friends and saying, “I’m Kobe, you be Gasol.”

Life is complicated once they become too big for Trumpette socks with bows on them.

Having a baby in the house makes purpose seem that much more important. The second kid also seems to bring with it a new impatience for dealing with things that don’t fit. I think it might be something to do with having less time and wanting to be more productive with the time you do have.

There was a time where figuring out how the mechanics of social media monetization worked was an endlessly interesting puzzle for me. That was how I started writing about the topic of mommyblogging as a business: it was curiosity that drove me more than anything. A few years ago, there was not much information available on how much money mommybloggers were making, or how they were making it. Even now, much of the information that is available is incorrect, incomplete, or misleading. There is still a need for honest reporting of this information. The problem is that it is not a job that will win you friends, and the weight of that can beat you down after a while.

Some time has passed since I first started writing about this stuff. I have seen behind the curtain now, and it’s not as interesting to me anymore. Despite the dubious quality of portions of the business writing available on the mommyblog space, it does give me some measure of solace that there is some type of conversation happening. Even if it’s about the wrong thing and with the wrong numbers, it is more than was happening three years ago.

All that said, I have grown weary of some of the practices, the smoke and mirrors, the straight up hustling that is part of professional mommyblogging. It is no different from any other commercial venture, but for this crucial point: we are supposed to act like it is different. We are supposed to act like it is all about community and the empowerment of women, and this sticks in my craw a bit. It is not about community and the empowerment of women — today it it is about Levi’s Curve ID and tomorrow it will be about Hillshire Farms. Which is completely fine. Just cop to it.

There have been some misunderstandings perpetuated lately about how much money successful mommybloggers make. Because most of the really successful ones will not talk about how much they make except off the record, it is easy to assume that everyone who mommyblogs is fighting over gigs that are worth a few hundred bucks a post at most: those are the people who respond to a general call on Twitter about rates for sponsored posts. But saying that this represents what successful mommybloggers make is like saying that you can judge the salary of a working actor by the extra who works as a waitress at nights to make ends meet.

The people who are making the real money are not talking about it publicly. They are not talking about it because the amount of money they make for these posts is jaw-dropping.

For bloggers who are doing it professionally, sponsored posts pay very very well. You probably don’t even know how well unless you happen to be one of those bloggers, or unless you have access to one of them. For example, in a recent post about how much money mommybloggers make, there was a bit about a blogger who claimed to have a million pageviews per month and who charged one thousand dollars for a sponsored post. I received a direct message on Twitter from somebody who knows how much these posts pay which said, “The fact that this blogger would charge only $1,000 for a sponsored post proves that she cannot possibly have a million pageviews.” Because if she really had a million pageviews, she would probably be charging at least $5,000 for a sponsored post. Or else in the market for new representation.

So you can see why turning down sponsored posts would be very difficult for bloggers to do. A few hours (tops) of work for several thousand dollars? It would be tough to find a writing gig that rivaled that return rate.

The problem is that all but the most dedicated of fans tends to be turned off by sponsored content, and I assume this is why these posts pay so well. I used to think that well-placed ads and professionally done placements would temper this effect, but recent months have shown this might not be the case. Is it that readers begrudge the blogger making money? Perhaps in some cases, but generally I think it has more to do with an authenticity problem: people who are attracted to blogs tend to like the personal, unpolished touch that differentiates blogs from magazines. Sponsored content gets in the way of that, and some audiences are more tolerant than others of the distance.

Whether you are a big blogger or a smaller blogger, you should keep this problem in mind when deciding to do a sponsored post. The larger bloggers need to worry about how many they can do before the audience turns off completely, and the smaller ones should probably be turning down most of (if not all of) the small offers if they ever want to be one of the people entertaining a large offer.