Making money one click at a time

As some of you may know I have not been working in a full time job for over a year now, hence the desire to make some more of my time consuming activities, such as blogging, pay for themselves. That's why after a comment from a friend who has the web site My Daily Yoga I decided to put some Google Ads on my two blogs.

So, as well as "What a sell out!" I expect you might be wondering how it is going. Well I never expected to get rich, or even make a living from Google ads - my main goal was to cover my hosting expenses. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to have been a reality and I'd have to have about five times the traffic to make that happen - or a lot of willing clickers.

Last month (August) Adsense recorded 2092 page impressions - there were 6 clicks on ads (0.3% of impressions) and that earned $1.81. Also there were 7 queries using the Google search with Adsense ads thrown in, resulting in two clicks on ads earning a mere $0.08. I've also noticed that the amount you earn for a click can vary dramatically - one click alone last month earned $1.41, most earn between 5 and 10 cents. I don't know if Adsense has some way to track when a click results in a sale and hence the big pay out, or maybe some advertisers offer premium amounts based on their product prices (like car manufactures).

So thus far Google's adsense hasn't exactly been money maker and since they don't pay out until you earn over $100 it could be several years before I even see a penny of it :-) But I can't complain really 2,000 page impressions a month isn't exactly a huge amount and to be honest my ads are often not that relevant to the page content (but certainly not completely irrelevant!). My alterior motive for having Google ads remains - if I ever get slammed by a Slashdot effect event the ads should probably generate enough ad clicks to pay for any bandwidth overage I incurr.

Finally to all of you who believe I'm a sell out for including ads I would like to remind them that it turns out that these days virtually the entire Internet is massively subsidised by advertising revenue so we all benefit from it, whether it be directly or not. Now I agree that an alternative is to completely do away with unsolicited advertising which would probably knock a significant percentage off all product prices, free up millions of people from the advertising business to do something more productive, encourage people to be more critical in their product purchasing, and save massive amounts of resources that are otherwise expended on advertising (be it billboard space, paper for junk mail, or bandwidth for advert images and videos). However just how likely is that to happen in our lifetimes? So my take is if I'm going to suffer the ills for advertising then why shouldn't I exploit it myself for my own benefit?