"She smiled despite herself. She was drawing a half-million readers a day by doing near to nothing besides repeating the mind-blowing conversations around her. It had taken her a month to consider putting ads on the site -- lots of feelers from blog 'micro-labels' who wanted to get her under management and into their banner networks, and she broke down when one of them showed her a little spreadsheet detailing the kind of long green she could expect to bring in from a couple of little banners, with her getting the right to personally approve every advertiser in the network. The first month, she'd made more money than all but the most senior writers on the Merc."
Two things. Makers is near-future speculative fiction, projecting the "next cycles" of technological boom and bust -- and with all the changes forecast in media and interactivity, the important forms of broadcast remain "blog" and "tweet." And (he writes, electronically, and posts to a blog) the effortless move into monetizing set out here seems just simply unproblematic -- charitably, due to the future setting, where the publication marketplace has settled; uncharitably, because it comes from one of the few bloggers to get rich from the link economy. Suzannne, the "she" here, a tech blogger, is able to succeed, wildly, through internet advertising: by catering to the enthusiasms of myriad faceless others.