Operation Filthy Lucre

Lenin once said that “social being determines social consciousness” but then again he would, wouldn’t he? What’s certainly the case is that he never had to deal with a seemingly intractable problem in WordPress so there seems to be little to be learned from that particular Russian gentleman.

Over the next week or so you may notice a few, hopefully unobtrusive, changes at Big Smoke. As the next stage in our site design we’re introducing “Operation Filthy Lucre”, otherwise known as some ads and “associate” links. “What’s this?” You’re thinking. “I thought Big  Smoke was dedicated to the overthrow of everything decent and good like a bunch of dirty anti-capitalists. Now you’re telling me they’re going to sell me washing powder?”

Fear not, you were right first time. We are dedicated to a jihad against Western capitalism, but we’re going to bring it down from the inside by outperforming rival corporations with our superior marketing model, like the outrageous Leninists we are. However, before we abolish money entirely we would like to be able to pay for our hosting, spreading the word about the site and other bits and bobs, like the occasional party. That takes shekels.

Soon you’ll see adverts appearing at the bottom of articles and the bottom of the right hand sidebar. Who knows, some of them may even be for washing powder! We’ll  monitor the content of the ads in order to blacklist the most unethical organisations and, by placing them at the bottom, we hope they don’t get in the way of your viewing pleasure.

In fact someone said to us the other day that it was weird not having adverts, and the last thing we would want to be is weird.

You may also see that when we talk about or highlight books there will be a link. If you buy them (or other offers) through this site it helps to finance us at no extra cost to yourself. We do not want any financial incentive to drive the content of the site so we will strive to ensure we never give a book a good review just to encourage you to buy it, or highlight something we wouldn’t consider worthwhile just to sell it to you.

Anyway, it’s important to be transparent about these things so even though no one is going to be making their fortune out of this site anytime soon, we do want to be open and unashamed about the fact that this site does have to bring in some kind of income eventually. There’s only so many tins of economy beans I can eat you know.