The Monetization of This Blog (Or, I’m Writing; Might as Well Get Paid)

For the longest time, this blog has been associated with a Google Adsense account. It displays advertisements quite innocuously in the upper right. Many of you don’t even notice because you have adblocker turned on. Many still don’t notice because they don’t visit this blog. Interestingly, the Adsense option may not be the best. I chose it back when I was earning a couple of dollars every month with my Youtube channel. Now, with Youtube expecting an individual to have 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of watch time, this “bundled option” seems like it makes less sense. For perspective, if I took the time to make a ten minute video every week, each video would need about 4500 views and have to be watched from beginning to end in order to then qualify for the Youtube Partner program. Then I’d have to hope my content didn’t raise any red flags. It’s a lot of work for what would earn, roughly speaking, $4 to $6 a week (given the above assumption of 4500 views a video, and this blog entry by Bill Roberts. ) I’d argue Bill’s math checks out: my most popular video of all time, “Brave Frontier – Easter Event 2017 – Autonomous Cotton Fight has just over 3,600 views and according to Youtube’s metrics earned me about $2.53. Not bad for something I was doing because I enjoyed it, but not anything I could reliably do to make a living.

Thanks to the encouragement of Flav Medeiros (whose Facebook group you should already be a member of!) I have taken the steps to become an Amazon affiliate. This is an interesting turn, because I’ll need to make sure this blog is up to date on the proper disclaimers and such. In most nations, you can’t simply say “here is a link to buy a thing” without disclosing “I might get a kickback if you buy the thing” unless you want to break a few laws. I would rather not explain to my prison mate that I’m doing hard time because I upset the FTC, please and thank you.

This is ultimately a step in the direction of treating this blog more seriously, keeping myself in the routine of writing, and hopefully also bringing in residual income (who doesn’t like that?)