Tim Blair shares his anguish over having contributed to Andrew Sullivan’s pledge drive now that the latter has decided to go on hiatus to travel and write a book.

Well, I can say here that I too have contributed to Andrew a few times. And while the thought crossed my mind that taking off after a few of these big-buck pledge drives could be construed as somewhat inappropriate, I have to say that I am not in the least bit bothered by it. If I see how much time I have spent reading and enjoying Andrew’s stuff (either the night-cap read or the morning coffee round) and what I learned from his viewpoints and analyses I can only say that if I distribute my contributions over the time spent on the Daily Dish it not only was a very small amount for what I got out of it, it was worth every penny. On top of that, but that may be unrelated, he sent quite a bit of traffic to this blog which would not have been here if it wasn’t for him: it was the first blog I came across after I saw Sullivan on CNN during the Florida recount and it inspired me to set up Peaktalk. I even participated in Andrew's short-lived book club with some of my thoughts ending up on the Daily Dish.

Yes, we can have a discussion about pledge drives but the fact of the matter is that a fairly unique mechanism (no one was forced to buy the product that was essentially available for free) supported Sullivan's writing at a particular point in time. So people contributing rewarded past writings and made an assumption about future work and it is to Andrew's credit that he was able to use that mechanism to generate significant cashflow. The market validated his blog, no small achievement.

Final note to Blair: don't worry too much, he’s on hiatus only.