This year I made 32 posts to this blog. There have been 264 page views in the last 12 months. This produced a total of zero ad clicks and $0.67 in earnings. Page views from all websites was 960 which produced $2.41 in total earnings. Yup, the numbers are pretty weak. You need to earn at least $100 before Google Adsense will give you a payment. My last payment was in 2017 which means it’s been 7 years since I have received a payment. At this rate I won’t get another payment until 2044. I will probably be in a nursing home by then. Ad revenue earnings have changed a lot in the past 7 years. I posted more this year than in the past and have less earnings to show for it.
Unless you are cheating the system with link farming or some other tactic to create traffic, you aren’t going to generate any ad revenue. I could post the cure for cancer or the secret to short term wealth and I don’t think anyone would find it. The Internet has become so large and saturated with sophisticated traffic generating schemes that it is impossible to compete. Hoping that someone will read your blog is like hoping to find a needle in a haystack in a field filled with haystacks. Money isn’t my motivation for making blog posts. If it was, I’d probably abandon blogging and start a YouTube channel and become a content creator.
Search engine optimization (SEO) can cost hundreds of dollars depending on how much traffic you want to generate. I have no interest in paying someone to generate traffic for me. I only post content when I feel that someone might find it interesting. When I dig deeper into the web traffic that I’m getting, I find that most of it comes from search engines or bots that are scouring the Internet for content. My posts end up with a low-ranking judging by the number of non-search traffic and earnings that result. SEO rules have changed a lot in the past 7 years. Google has also changed the way they monetize and serve ads. It has become more complicated over the years. Unless you can devote serious time to following the trends you will likely see less traffic and less earnings just as I have.