BLOGGER BARS
Since I had paid money to Blogger a few years ago to get rid of the ads on the top of my page I was brand-free -- until the Blogger "Navbar" appeared a few days ago.

When Google bought Blogger they extended my ad-free benefits and I didn't have to pay any money for the extension. But now all of that is history. Blogger is phasing in Blogger bars on the top of all of their pages. The ad-free people no longer have the pay for ad-free option and the ads have disappeared from from the blogs -- or so it seems. Everyone gets a customizable-in-four colors Blogger bar.

I just don't quite get the economics of it, though. How are they making money by putting yet another search mechanism on the top of all their pages. Search results occasionally produce advertising revenue for Google but is it worth the trade-off for them? I'm sure someone somewhere at Google crunched the numbers. They are awfully smart cookies. They did, after all, make $1.2 billion dollars on the stock market today. But I don't get it.

Still the Blogger bar isn't too intrusive. If they were to offer me an option to pay to remove the bar I would probably decline at this point.