A Word About Our Sponsors

The world of blogging is interesting, to say the least. To be successful, you must be passionate about your topic and secondly you must write without reservations or expectations. That means you do it because you like to, not because you get paid. For most bloggers, in the cocktail realm, that is the standard. Sure there are perks, like free booze mail, which causes a Pavlovian response everytime the UPS truck drives past the house. Or better yet, there are a few advertisers that pay to place a banner on our sites and I’d just like to make mention of it.

Because bloggers are passionate, we tend to write about what we like and usually don’t hold back on what we don’t like. This style of writing can actually generate trends because people with the same opinions will align themselves with the blogger. Eventually it will grow to a point where you have a dedicated readership, but also inspire parts of the readership to create their own blogs.

Consider it kind of like a tree, where the trunk starts to create branches. In the cocktail blogosphere, Cocktail Chronicles (Paul Clarke) and Slakethirst (now pretty much defunct) would be considered the trunk, with the Art of Drink, Spirits & Cocktails, Kaiser Penguin and Jeffrey Morgenthaler becoming the first set of branches and then a whole list of others branching off from there. Basically, we’ve created a community of free, original, collaborative, trend setting, cocktail and drink related content.

To me that sounds like an advertisers dream. But some advertisers are scared away by the honesty of these sites, because they have a difficult time controlling the message. Where a TV network will bend over backwards to get ads, because they have shareholders to report to, bloggers usually don’t. Once we become shills, our credibility goes down the toilet and that’s about all we have to maintain our readership.

Having said that, we don’t mind a little extra income to cover the costs of lemons, limes, rye, exotic liqueurs, boutique tonic water, assorted lab chemicals, gnarley barware and a crap load of other stuff. 

When we get advertisers that support the cocktail blogging community I like to point it out. Not that this happens very often. If you read the actual websites, not just the RSS feeds, you will have noticed that Midori has decided to purchase some ad space across a number of blogs and I’d just like to say thanks. Please take a moment and check out their website if you have a moment. (Midori Awakening)

1. There were a bunch of other sites that contributed early on, but have decided to pass the torch to the rest of us. DC Drinks and Martini Republic were good examples.