If you’re not running an ad blocker, you may notice that there are small Google Adsense ads running on this site. After having blogged for 11 years without ads, I had wanted to see what the numbers for online advertising looked like. Specifically, I wanted to know the orders of magnitude in traffic needed for a blog to be self-sustaining.
Turns out paying for hosting will take a bit more than just throwing on a few banners.
Of course, the problem lies with the amount of traffic – or, the lack thereof – that this blog receives. I’ve never bothered trying to optimize for traffic1, and beyond a handful of posts to Hacker News, the viewing stats remain unsurprisingly modest:
Which means that the amount earned by Adsense is non-existent:
Since Google does not make any payments until the total accumulates to $100, at the current pace, I’ll see my first check in less than a thousand years. I’m giddy just thinking of participating in all the advertising.
That is, no click-baity titles for the most part.↩