Metaxucafe and brainiads

From an email I received yesterday evening:

"MetaxuCafe announces the launch of brainiads, an ad network for culturally
oriented Websites.

Brainiads emerged from three blogger's [sic] dissatisfaction with many of the
current options for placing ads on our sites. We want to earn money for all
the effort we put into our writing, but we want to do it on our own terms.
Our focus at brainiads is on aesthetics and personal attention. We want ads
that are complimentary and unobtrusive and we want only to deal with
advertisers that we think are relevant to our collective readership.

Brainiads also acts as a firewall between you and advertisers, eliminating
any conflicts of interests you may feel arise about writing about products
like books or music. We at brainiads are bloggers ourselves and believe we
understand your concerns and wishes and we want to represent you so you can
concentrate on your site's content and not worry about business details.

Please stop by the brianiads site ( http://brainiads.com ) for more
information. We have 26 sites as of today and will be capping membership at
various levels, so join up as soon as you can.

While we've been talking to potential advertisers for some time we expect it
to take a few months to get a critical mass of ads on our sites. Don’t let
that stop you from signing up, though. The stronger the network, the more
attractive we will be to the high-caliber advertisers we are targeting.

Join up and be a brainiad today: http://brainiads.com

Bud Parr,
MetaxuCafe
Chekhov's Mistress

Max Magee,
The Millions (a blog about books)

Scott Esposito,
Conversational Reading"

Metaxucafe (or "meataxe" as spell-checker would have it) is a network for literary blogs and bloggers. Here is its mission statement:

"MetaxuCafé is devoted to highlighting the best content from the community of bloggers who write about books. We serve both the writers and readers and intend to drive traffic to member’s sites and create context around and give permanence to their original writing."

I can recommend joining if you have a relevant blog and haven't already joined. I'm not sure I will be applying to brainiads, not out of principle but because putting ads on my site is not a high priority among my many other priorities -- I calculate I would make a dollar in about 50 years.

Comments

[James]

I'm with Scott on this - a good idea and I hope it works for them. Having passed the 100 readers in a day mark for the first time yesterday (largely thanks to your kind note to Frank, Maxine), I don't think my blog is any sort of gold mine. And besides that'snot why I blog (but we all say that).

[shameless]

Petrona,
I love reading yourr blog, and that's why I'd like to offer some feedback about something that's straining me old eyes. You use a lot of light blue for links and things, which I can hardly read. Is it possible to choose a colour that is more defined? I send lots of sunshine your way.

[Maxine]

Thank you so much for your kind words, Shameless. I quite agree about the light blue links, I can't see them either as my eyesight is not too good these days. Unfortunately the light blue comes as default with this template, so I always make the links bold so they show up better-- and if I remember, colour them. I'll try to be better about remembering to do this, or maybe change my template design again -- unfortunately the typepad options aren't too good.

all best
Maxine.

[marydell]

I have ads on my site, but I only make enough money to pay for bandwidth. Costs have been going up with increased traffic, so a friend of mine was going to refer me into Blogads. I was really happy when Brainiads came along since their focus is mostly on the book market.