What's the deal?

We here at Contemporary Insanity have been at it for a few years now, offering videos and commentary at various points in the site's history.

Contemporary Insanity started as my personal blog, and rose as high as 4,000 visitors a day average, when one evening I saw a massive opportunity to make a quick profit and at the same time provide a valuable service to the Internet Community.

A little History:

Back before the rise of YouTube, we had to get our video fix from sites like Break.com, and EBaum's World. We had to click through a bunch of pages so that we could get to the multimedia content we actually wanted, while these people made us jump through their hoops to gain those extra few pageviews per visitor.

One evening, I was sitting online and noticed people clamoring for a particular video , the sources for which kept crashing under the demand. Since I had plenty of spare capacity on my dedicated server, I figured I could make some quick money by offering the video, and without worries about crashing an ISP's crowded shared-hosting server.

The rest, more or less, is history. A few more little video events popped up in the fall of 2004. We stayed up through the mad rush for the tsunami videos , getting simultaneously farked and slashdotted in the process. I was hooked: writing blog commentary could be fun, but watching my server pump content to tens of thousands of people a day was really fulfilling.

Moving On

From there, CI has continued to pump out the bits, providing 60,000+ visitors a month with about 350,000+ pageviews and an average of 250GB of bits moved. The problem has always been finding time to keep the site updated. I run a busy consulting practice, and  my various projects have always kept me from being as active with the site as I would like to be.

I've tried, at various points, to encourage users to submit content, from weblinks to forum posts, to commentary and video content. It's never worked out very well; my logs indicate that only about 20% of this site's visitors return regularly. The other 80% get their fix and go, never to return.

This is where you come in

With revenue and traffic sharing, we aim to not only provide a platform from which new contributors can be recognized and rewarded, but also a way for them to begin building their own website presence with a little help from us. 

How it works:

1.) You sign up for Google AdSense, if you haven't already. Do NOT use CI as your website for Google Adsense Applications!!! Use your own website, instead. As long as your website does not violate the Adsense TOS, you will be approved.

2.) You contribute to CI, notifying us of your Adsense Publisher and Channel ID (if applicable.)

3.) We set things up so that, moving forward, all your contributions to CI earn you 50% of the revenue generated by the Google Adsense ads, which are tucked between the Main Content pane and the "Recently Featured" and "Top 20" modules. 

4.) Let us know about your website so we can add it to our Featured Websites 

Guidelines:

1.) You can tuck your name and website information into the footer of the article. This is *only* to keep the frontpage uncluttered. Most of our visitors come in through search engines, straight to a given article, anyway, so your name and website will get "out there".

2.) No Pr0n. We tried running some lightweight boobies videos, didn't work out real well, in the sense that I don't really want the sort of problems that introducing pr0n brings.

3.) Contemporary Insanity reserves the right to approve or disapprove, run or not run, edit or not edit, any piece of user-submitted content as may be required, for any reason or cause, to fit either the CI website or these editorial guidelines. Additionally, we reserve the right to institute new rules, policies, and guidelines, at any time, with or without prior notice.

4.) All submissions shall be governed under other CI policies such as the Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions. 

5.) By contributing, you grant Contemporary Insanity a permanent, non-transferrable license to use your content. However, unlike some similar policies, we're not stealing your copyrights: You can post your content to your website as well, if you wish. 

6.) We're really angling more for commentary, essay, and reviews of music, entertainment, and products than for more video submissions, but that said:

Video Submission Guidelines:

We can pull videos from nearly anywhere, from stripping silly DRM from streaming news videos to pulling content in from YouTube and Google Video. Click here to read about how to submit a video article .

Ready to get Started?

Sweet! We look forward to working with you! Just select the submission options at left!