Back in October, I decided to run Google AdSense ads on my site. I wasn’t expecting a lot of money, but I was hoping to see enough for the site to pay for its hosting.
Unfortunately, AdSense isn’t going to do it.
I added AdSense on October 20, 2007. On November 7, 2007 it broke $1. On November 21, 2007 it broke $2. On November 24, 2007 it broke $3. On December 5, 2007 it broke $4 and hit $4.26. It hasn’t moved again since. That’s over two months.
I wondered at first if I’d broken something. I refreshed all the AdSense code, and even expanded the number of ads I was serving. Nothing. Since December 5, 2007 I haven’t seen a penny.
Oh, sure, maybe it will get better, but it isn’t going to get that much better. Maybe I could reasonably expect to see a hundred dollars by the time my boy wants higher education (he’s nine months old now), but I don’t think it’s worth looking at the ads (and their ever-decreasing quality) until then.
And so it comes time to bid AdSense farewell. It was a compromise that simply wasn’t worth it, but I’d like to think I learned something from the experience. Although other than AdSense doesn’t work, I’m not sure what that would be.