I respect Seth Godin greatly, but I adamantly disagree with this post “Ads are the new tip jar.” In fact, I think he’s dead wrong.

Ads are useless if they are used as tip jars. That’s not what advertisers want to be. Can you imagine telling an advertiser “hey buy space on my site – and I’ll ask people to click it to pay me.” I’m sure through some sneaky tricks the advertisers could still feel confident they could sell their own product, but make no mistake – that’s the end goal of advertising, they don’t care about you or the content you produce, it’s about their bottom line. You making any money is a distant second.

Why not just (gasp) tip the writer directly? I know it’s a crazy idea but….the tip jar is the new tip jar.

That’s what Spot.us is betting on at least. The problem right now is that it’s easier to click an advertisement then it is to support a journalist through a tip jar – but that means we need to think harder about how we ask for the tip, not throw our hands up and say “advertising will take care of it.” For most newspapers – advertising won’t cut it, not just because people don’t click, but because when the do – it creates mere pennies, not enough to actually support in-depth reporting.

More thoughts here.

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