“You’re really not generating enough traffic and click-throughs for us, Chuck… unfortunately, we have to make a decision regarding your working with us.”

It’s Tuesday afternoon.  A rainstorm outside my door has just subsided, and hopefully the flood that fell out of the skies will coat our thermometers and give our skins repose.

Then I received a call on my cell phone.

“Hello?”

“Hi, is this Chuck Miller?”

“Yes, this is he.”

I didn’t initially recognize the caller’s voice, but after the person explained what was going on, I knew this was not a call I wanted to deal with.

“Chuck, the truth of the matter is, you’ve been with us for nearly two years now.  And although I understand you’re working very hard on what you produce online, we’re just not getting the click-throughs from our advertising on your pages.  We’re getting them from other websites, but not yours.  I don’t know what to say.”

“Well,” I replied, “I’m doing the best that I can.  I’ve been writing about my experimental photography and all that – the Swiss rolls, the split film, the polar panoramas and the – ”

“Yes, we know,” was the response. “But that’s not drawing the kind of traffic that benefits our advertising.”

I’m not liking where this is going.

“And those other things you write about,” the caller continued, “they don’t fit with our advertising.  You really need to concentrate on providing us with content that will benefit our advertising.  I can send you some tips on what to do to help promote us – and then, in return, we can promote you.”

“You haven’t promoted me at all,” I snarled.  “Not in two years’ time.”

“Well, you haven’t given us the Internet traffic – the click-throughs – not as much as we get from our other pages.  Those click-throughs are very important.  If we’re not getting a reasonable amount of click-throughs on your pages, then we have to make a decision.”

A decision.  I’ve put two years of my life into working with you and it’s not good enough.  Now I’m reduced to a “decision.”

“Mr. Miller, we have to make a decision regarding your working with us.  I’m going to e-mail you some tips on how to help improve what you provide online, which in return will send us some more viewers, and which in turn will provide us with clicks that will turn into advertising dollars.  And if you can do that, then you can continue to work with us.”

Wow.  Talk about blunt.  “Are you telling me that you’re not getting as many viewers from me as you are from other locations – and that you might cut me loose if the click-throughs don’t improve?”

“That’s pretty much it, if I’m being truthful, Mr. Miller.”

I guess I have no choice.  It’s one thing to hold steady and stand one’s ground for the sake of artistic freedom, but I guess when dollars and cents come into play, there really is no choice.

“Okay,” I glumly responded.  “Please send the suggestions to me at my personal e-mail account.  I’ll look them over.”

“Great, Mr. Miller,” the caller replied.  “And when you get them, please e-mail me back that you’ve received them so that I know that you’re doing what we want you to do.  Have a great day.”

Click.

Well, this is a shock.  I thought I was doing all the right things.  I thought I was giving them everything they asked for.  Every time.  Every day.  Without fail.  But maybe they just didn’t like what I was doing.  Maybe they thought my site was all over the place.  Or maybe, just maybe, my working with this company was a big fat mistake in the first place – a blind date that turned into a shotgun marriage and nobody can find the divorce papers.

So I made the decision.

I don’t need this hassle any more.  So let’s make it official, before anyone in a higher authority edits this blog post.

I’m done.  I quit.

Oh, and “quit” does not mean that I’m stopping my work with the TU.  Heck, I’ve got a consecutive day streak reaching nearly two years, I ain’t interrupting that for anything.

Instead, I went over to my personal chuckthewriter.com homepage, and yes it’s a homemade page – a crazy-quilt of various homemade HTML graphics and whatnot.  About two years ago, I contacted a camera outlet and asked about personal sponsorship – I’ve shopped at their store for many years, and thought maybe if there was some way to purchase branded gear – shirts, caps, camera straps – I would certainly wear that material on my PBL basketball photo trips and the like.

The outlet said that they didn’t have any branded camera gear, but what they did have was an advertising click-through program for my personal homepage.  If I put a customized banner on my homepage, they would in turn provide me with cash money via click-throughs.  Similar to Google Adwords or the like.

But I eventually joined the Times Union’s blog crew, and while I concentrated on my blog, my personal homepage just sat there.  Yeah, I’ve had offers from friends to update it or modernize it or whatnot, but those offers never got past the “I’d like to do it” stage.  So I really never provided the camera store with that many clicks.

And apparently they decided to call me and chastise me about it.  “Get us more clicks,” they said, “or we’ll have to make a decision regarding your working with us.”

So I made the decision.

I downloaded the index.html page from my website to my hard drive.  I opened up the HTML file in Notepad.  Carefully looking for the lines of code that translated to the advertising banner.

Delete.

Delete.

Delete.

Update.

Upload back to the FTP site.

You can’t quit me, camera outlet.  I quit you first.  Nyaah.

Now don’t misinterpret this.  I love this camera store and I will shop there every time I have money and a need to  spend it.  But I am not going to be bullied by anyone into changing the way I do anything just because they’re not making enough money off of a personal homepage.  No sir.  That’s why I’m not mentioning this camera store’s name.  I like them too much to uncloak their identity in this dispute.

But I don’t need ANYONE hassling me over my not providing them with enough online clicks – especially when they haven’t paid me one zinc-clad penny for doing so.