bookofjoe and naming rights

The other day I read an amusing piece by Bridget Johnson in the online version of the Wall Street Journal on selling naming rights to hurricanes to megamillionaires.

Here's the best part of her article:
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Here's an idea: Instead of letting hurricane names fall to the despised third-grade teacher of some bitter meteorologist, play to someone's fantasies of world domination and reap the benefits.

Let some egotistical billionaire sponsor and name a hurricane, sort of like those "name that star" registries.

Sponsors would start by evacuating residents to swanky hotels at a safe distance; no more cots in gymnasiums.

Then they can collect headlines about how they're about to ravage the East Coast and lay waste to every palm tree in their path.

Get a domination rush, then pay for all the damage in return.

That would pretty much ensure there will never be a Hurricane Bridget - but if the fault line running miles below my closet ever breaks loose, I'm digging myself out from underneath the mountain of shoes and petitioning the U.S. Geological Survey.
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Now, you do know that at some point, bookofjoe is gonna produce money.

Serious money.

Not yet.

Not soon.

But some day.

In the meantime, I toy with various ideas.

There's Google's AdSense, which has brought significant cash to lots of people.

There's the old PayPal donation button routine, which still seems tacky to me.

There's the subscription model, which might have worked with bookofjoe Version 1.0 - at least, judging by the number of people who emailed me after I folded it to say they'd gladly have paid to read it.

And I'm sure there are myriad others.

But naming rights, now that's an interesting concept.

I mean, I'm not gonna name it bookofphillip or bookofbridget just because you pony up some lucre, of whatever degree of cleanliness.

No, what I'm toying with here is the selling - yes, selling - of a post here for a given fee.

I'd write up your site, or product, or whatever, after the money was deposited to my numbered account.

Of course, I'd have to say up front "This is a paid-for post," or something similar, right?

Newspapers still - for the most part - keep editorial and advertising separate.

When CEO Mark Willes at the LA Times tried to knock down the separation between "church and state," he lost his job.

But probably, if I did carry paid posts, fewer people would read bookofjoe, so I'd gradually end up getting less and less from a would-be paid placement poster.

Well, I was just thinking out loud.

How difficult life would be if we could read each other's mind.