“Mommy Blogger” Heather Armstrong Monetizes The Hate [Crap E-mail From World]
Regular readers of Dooce know that blogger Heather B. Armstrong gets a whole lot of hate mail. Yesterday, she launched a site featuring entertaining examples of it, surrounded by advertisements galore: A little something she calls Monetizing the Hate.
Context & Ripple Effects
Armstrong's move lands at the far end of an argument the blog world has been having for years. When corporate ad money first flooded personal blogs, the New York Times flagged the risk to bloggers' rebel reputations (corporate ad money flows their way), and by 2007 the Los Angeles Times was asking outright whether blogging for dollars compromised online ethics.
Monetizing the Hate answers those questions with maximalism rather than restraint: if the audience's affection can be sold, so can its hostility. It also lands against the backdrop of louisgray.com's 2008 claim that most bloggers don't deserve any ad revenue (most bloggers don't deserve any ad revenue) — Armstrong, one of the highest-profile mommybloggers, demonstrating why the traffic she commands makes her the exception.
First-order effects
- Hate mail previously sent to tear Armstrong down becomes pageviews: each entertaining example published on the new site generates ad impressions for Dooce's operator, converting harassment into revenue.
- The critics whose emails are showcased become unwitting content contributors, with their messages republished as entertainment without any upside for them.
Second-order effects
- Other high-traffic bloggers facing hostile mail gain a template for the same conversion — negative attention reframed as shareable material wrapped in ads — which pressures peers to mine their own inboxes.
- Advertisers buying Dooce inventory now appear beside mockery of Armstrong's detractors, tightening the link between her personal brand voice and the brands paying to be adjacent to it — exactly the authenticity trade-off raised in earlier coverage.
Third-order effects
- If every form of audience response, including abuse, becomes monetizable inventory, the personal blog drifts from diary to media property where the writer controls framing of both fans and attackers — a structural shift in who owns the narrative around public figures online.
- For the mommyblogger segment specifically, the episode sharpens the ethical debate over monetization boundaries: once even hate is inventory, there is no obvious floor on what a personal site will publish for revenue.
The trend: Personal-blog economics are absorbing every form of audience attention — praise, criticism, and abuse alike — into advertising inventory.