Ad Nonsense

SUCH AN ENTICING OFFER! Subject the reader (that’s you) to an ad or two and you’ll start raking in the earnings in no time. Online revenue was making millionaires out of people far younger than I am, yet I was there at the beginnings of all this computers ‘n’ internet stuff, writing about it, for heaven’s sake, so why should I be left out.

And it would be so simple to get started. Just answer a few 
questions . . . 

As it happens, I went through that process already, soon after I started this blog in 2011, back when ad-clicks quickly turned into money and I actually got a couple of payments. Then it turned out that the majority – in fact, the entirety – of those clicks were coming from my wife’s workplace, as she generously pursued a campaign of putting some money in my pocket (thus avoiding having me take money out of hers). Google caught on, and ripped away my ad-revenue account.

I appealed the decision, but there’s no semblance of a courtroom in place. My emails were bot-swatted back to me. There’s no other method of contact. I gave up. After all, why would they even believe me when I whined that I knew nothing about this scam?

But if it’s a process that’s supposed to generate cash for me, it’s generating even more cash for Google. They floated an AdSense offer my way last year, I responded, and they accepted my application as if there’d never been any prior difficulty.

I started the ads running on this blog-site in July 2023, and was immediately scolded by the Ad-Sense bots for being too lax in pursuing those wealth-generating clicks. I haven’t heard from them in quite a while, however, so I suspect they gave me up as a lost cause. As far as I’m concerned, it’s bad enough to fling ads in your face at all, never mind trying to rope you into viewing more of them or clicking through them or whatever it is I’m supposed to do to make the cash register ring.

It’s not as if I have control over the ads that you’ve been seeing here – or, if I did, I never learned how to choose them. Besides, were I able to dd so, I’d be showing you ads for classical records and obscure books and foreign movies and the like, hardly the stuff that’s going to drop any dimes into the till.

Bad enough that the stuff you have been seeing hasn’t been paying all that much, and by “all that much” I mean “next to nothing.”

I generated a report of the totality of my earnings, starting in July 2023, when I first began punishing you with these ads. My earnings for that month were 88 cents, skyrocketing to $2.36 the following month. After which it leveled off, bringing me an average of $1.43 per month. Which brings my total to date to $33.56. 

Not that I’ve seen any of that, because I don’t get paid until I reach their threshold of $100 in earnings. At this rate, that will take me to 2031, and I’m not sure I’ll even be around that long. So I’ve pulled the plug. You’re welcome.