Why I am using Google Adsense
You will noticed that you see in the meanwhile the usage of google dadsense. You think
"Why the hell he are doing this?"
So let me introduce some historical information.
The beginning of my Blog
I started this blog as a side project. This blog was for me a "note" that will hold every gathered experienced information about tech and IoT.
Fortunately, the public interest was increasing due to fact the I published some posts on Reddit, medium dev.to, and so on. It was not my intent to gain public interests but I am lucky with it :).
But with increasing the public traffic the hosting will become more expensive.
Some numbers
At the beginning of the year 2024, I got about 32.000 unique users per day, who visit my blog, around the clock. so it must be online 24/7, no closing no outage.
The blog must be updated regularly, to close security bugs. Instead of running two servers, I use docker to run this blog (because it's handy).
It's running as an Azure Webapp with slottings, so the update cycle will be reduced to the minimum downtime. Also, it must run backups too. The next thing is that I must it georedundant because this will be required to increase the Google ranking otherwise it will be ranked low because it is a slow site. So at this point, I try to think about how I generate some money with this blog
Generating money with this blog
First I decided to use Amazon stripe for generating passive income. Amazon Stripe is an affiliate system. This will generate my partner links with this you can buy things on Amazon without extra costs, and I get some money while you are purchasing articles.
But this brought me no cash.
The next idea was to provide a paid subscription. I generate the benefit that paid subscribers get articles one week earlier than the free subscribers. The paid subscription will help me get some bucks to pay the bill for the server costs.
The result was that I got some paid subscribers, thank you for this support btw! But it doesn't take half of the costs of the blog. But anyway it supports me in case to reduce the costs.
Using Google Adsense
Yeah, I don't like blogs that get overwhelmed with ads in every free space. So it was a hard decision. I give it actually a try to get me some income. The ads will be presented in every article on the left and right side. So I think the reading of an article will not be disturbed by the aggressive ads.
This will not be a final solution. So every paid member will get in future an add-free version of this blog. That will be the first step in the next time. But I think there are some more
Future plans
Shortly I think I will tend to serve more digital products to sell, like online courses or s.th. For this, I must think about the paid members and how i can integrate them. But for this, I will generate a separate blog post that will handle this special topic.
Final words
So I hope that the using of ads in this blog will not bother you and I can explain to you a little bit the background of the decision. It will not be forever but I think I give it a try.