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It’s been a little over a week since I started playing around with advertising. Income has been erratic to say the last ranging from $51/day and down to a much more expected $3/day which a few outliers on either side.

So far I have joined the following money-making schemes


  • Adsense, which serves text links. Adsense tries to find relevant ads based on certain keywords. It may not be entirely intelligent. For instance, if I say “credit cards are bad”, it might show ads for credit cards. If I suggest using baking soda instead of toothpaste, it might show ads for teeth whitening. I get paid per click, but it’s not that simple. Obviously advertisers only want to pay for “genuine business” and google has algorithms that put the clutch on any behavior that suggests otherwise, which effectively means I don’t get paid.
  • AdsDAQ, which serves annoyingly animated ads or whatever they feel like. Here I set my own rate and any advertiser that is willing to pay the (rather high) rate gets to put whatever they want there. Here I get paid per “impression” regardless of whether anyone clicks. This income is more predictable than Adsense. If there are no buyers, the ad shown defaults to adsense.
  • Amazon affiliate links. If you click on a link on this site that goes to amazon and you buy something on amazon, regardless of whether it was the thing that the link originally led to, I get a 4%+ referral fee. This holds as long as you buy something there within, I believe, 24 hours, I get paid. Unless you click on another affiliate link on some other site in the meantime in which case they get paid. I note that very few actually buy the books I suggest (why buy, when you can get them from the library?). Instead people buy all sorts of other things, the most interesting being a huge box of several hundred condoms. Godspeed to you, dude!

FYI: I do not block individual ads. I may look into doing that in the future.

If $3/day is going to be the norm, I am not going to reach my $100/month goal which is my criteria for keeping the ads on. I talked with “MoneyEnergy“, and we agreed that the best way to “monetize” ERE is probably to sell ebooks given the ratio between recurring visitors and one-time search engine visitors. In fact, if you compare the stats(*) of ERE to an immensely popular blog like The Simple Dollar, you will see that the average TSD visitor spends 40 seconds on the site. The average ERE visitor spends 279 seconds.
It seems much less likely that anyone hanging around for several minutes is going to end up clicking on an ad, but conversely more likely that they may be interested in buying a book to read more, or at least get it from the library ;-)

(*) It is interesting how few bloggers are actually willing to reveal these stats to the public. Kudos to TSD for keeping them open, and yeah, kudos to me too 8-) .

Incidentally, if you hate advertising and everything it stands for, use an RSS reader to read blog posts instead. It is much more convenient as you do not have to go to all the blogs to see if anything new has been posted. The reader does it for you.


Newsflash. Shortly after I wrote this, but probably coincidentally, google has disabled Adsense for my blog due to “Invalid Activity”. I think I am being railroaded by some algorithm and I have appealed this to google. Until I get an answer back from google, I have disabled the ads.