by Paul J. Pelkonen
Image from Monopoly © Parker Brothers.
It's been a pretty amazing run since a journalist sitting in a New Jersey hotel room on New Year's Eve 2009 decided to take this blog to a "semi-daily" format and run it like a regular (or decidedly irregular) classical music publication. Today, we broke 1,500,000 page views on Blogger. And this month, over 57,000 browsers have clicked and read our content, nearly double what our readership was just one year ago.Successful? Sure. By the standards of this 21st century Internet economy, not bad. But it hasn't been easy. And frankly, we need your help.
One of the questions I get asked is "How does this blog make money?" When it does, it's usually through sales of advertising space. And we have a handy-dandy guide on the site to how much ads cost on the blog.
Superconductor is free to read, thanks to the miracle of the Internet. But the blog (and its author) relies on income like any other business. If you are a local business owner who relies on the New York classical music season to put audience members in your restaurant, or a performing arts organization, agent, festival or record label looking to increase its audience and sales, we might just be the perfect place for you to advertise.
You might be a regular or occasional reader enjoying our web or e-mail coverage of the classical music scene. In that case, we have a handy-dandy PayPal button on the left-hand column of the blog. Your contributions will go towards further travel and inconvenient expenses associated with being an opera journalist in New York (like Internet bill, MetroCards and even Metropolitan Opera tickets!) and will be paid back in hard work and quality content, delivered in a prompt, reliable fashion.
Finally, all of our listings include hand-coded links to Amazon.com products, usually related in some way to the music or product being discussed in the post. Clicking on them and buying cool stuff will not only get you cool stuff but as an Amazon merchant, will help sustain the blog.
So become a friend of Superconductor and help this little blog (which is mostly written by one guy chained to a laptop in a Brooklyn apartment) keep on keeping on.
Thanks for reading,
Paul J. Pelkonen
Editor, Superconductor