In the following post I’m going to explain how WPNI, Grove City College & Jason Calcanis  all relate …

Washington Post ?? 

If you don’t exclusively view my posts in a feed reader, you may have seen that I’ve decided to start running advertisements on my blog. 

I’m doing this through a partnership with the Washington Post Blogroll program.   According to their blog, they only accept about 10% of the blogs that applied to participate in the program and I’m honored to be one of them.

I think the Washington Post is on the right track with this program.  Andrew Chen, the EIR at Mohr Davidow Ventures & formerly a Director at Revenue Sciences, has an interesting analysis explaining Why build a vertical ad network?  He has some great analysis on the general value of building vertical ad networks.  However, one point can’t be overlooked:

Owning a destination site is good
In the case of Google, they already had their own destination site, so they were able to bring their own inventory to the table. Once they had that, they were able to attract advertisers, which they could then tap as they expanded their base of inventory through partner deals.

Anyway, this is the subject for another post - but newspapers & other traditional media need to leverage their sales people & base of inventory to get into the business of creating networks around their specialty.  The Washington Post is obviously doing this with categories of blogs they have advertising relationships with, but local newspapers could do this with local blogs, technology publishers could do this with tech blogs, etc … More on this in a future post!

Anyway, I really view the site as a “personal business card”.  Therefore, even though I love what WPNI is doing, I wasn’t crazy about running ads on my site.  However, then I had an idea …

How does that relate to Grove City College?

As I mentioned last week, I have a strong belief in what Grove City is doing with their Entrepreneurship Program.  I am always trying to come up with create ways to support the program. Therefore, I’ve decided to donate all the profits from the ads that run on this site to the program.  This leads to the last point …

  So, how does this relate to Jason? 

Well, I got the inspiration from Jason Calacanis & his tremendous support of Bay Ridge Preparatory School.  Before anyone gets excited, I’ll be lucky to generate $100 for Grove City.  However, Jason has also sold a companies to AOL/TW, Dow Jones & currently works at Sequoia Capital as an EIR.  I have a few years to go before my personal blog (podcast in Jason’s case) is worth over $100k of advertising revenue.  However, one thing I’ve learned about philanthropy is it only gets harder to start as the amount of money you make goes up.  Therefore, I’m starting right now!