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After 20 years I turned off Google Adsense for my websites (2025)

blog.ericgoldman.org

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Re: After 20 years I turned off Google Adsense for my websites (2025)

#21

Post by donatj »

I have a tool on my website that gets about 250k unique views per day. During COVID I decided to put a single ad on the page to try to make up for my wife's lost income. It was for a time bringing in close to $500 a month, and was a nice little side income.

My wife never returned to work, we had kids and she has stayed at home with them. As such the ad has stayed up. Last I checked though it is bringing in something like $36 a month despite traffic being higher than ever. I get a payout from Google every couple months.

I'm considering taking it down just because the payoff is so low. It's honestly barely breaking even with the added expense of complicating my taxes.

Re: After 20 years I turned off Google Adsense for my websites (2025)

#22

Post by ceejayoz »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #11
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #5

I do find it interesting that the author specifies they use an ad blocker whilst also wanting to view the industry 'from the inside'. I'm not sure there isn't a level of hypocrisy there, albeit understandable. As staunchly anti-advertising, I wouldn't include advertising on anything I publish personally, but then I also don't publish anything, so I have no pressure to change my stance. I think I've convinced myself t…

It's an act of self-protection. I'm not anti-advertising. I'm anti-running-untrusted-software on my property. If they had stuck to adwords and static images with no invasive tracking I'd let their ads run. But the surveillance capitalists can't help themselves and want to run their 50MB spyware payload on my computer. I say no to that garbage.

Precisely this. The industry has themselves to blame.

Re: After 20 years I turned off Google Adsense for my websites (2025)

#23

Post by cryptoegorophy »

beej71 wrote: post #7

I had some sites that used it years ago ca. 2006. $500/mo at peak. Then one month it suddenly halved for no apparent reason. And it kept dropping. After a while or just wasn't with the ugliness. And I learned to never count on Google. Since then I've become anti-ad and haven't had any for years. I am sorry for my embarrassing lapse in judgment. :)

So if you don’t say anything then Google will think - yeah, that’s one way to make profit!

Re: After 20 years I turned off Google Adsense for my websites (2025)

#24

Post by marginalia_nu »

paulcole wrote: post #10
beej71 wrote: post #7

I had some sites that used it years ago ca. 2006. $500/mo at peak. Then one month it suddenly halved for no apparent reason. And it kept dropping. After a while or just wasn't with the ugliness. And I learned to never count on Google. Since then I've become anti-ad and haven't had any for years. I am sorry for my embarrassing lapse in judgment. :)

Easy to become anti-ad after they stop paying lol Like me becoming anti-my-girlfriend after she dumped me

Well it's a trade off right?

If the benefit outweighs the drawbacks, you say yes, and when the benefits evaporate leaving only the drawbacks, it's a no.

Re: After 20 years I turned off Google Adsense for my websites (2025)

#25

Post by freitasm »

I joined AdSense in 2003. At peak it was generating US$15k a month.

Nowadays it will be a miracle if it passes of US$800 a month.

I think the shift to a more localised audience (NZ), diversion of ad spend to large social networks are responsible. Our traffic is similar in volume but nowhere near as "valuable" apparently.

Re: After 20 years I turned off Google Adsense for my websites (2025)

#29

Post by princevegeta89 »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #5

I do find it interesting that the author specifies they use an ad blocker whilst also wanting to view the industry 'from the inside'. I'm not sure there isn't a level of hypocrisy there, albeit understandable. As staunchly anti-advertising, I wouldn't include advertising on anything I publish personally, but then I also don't publish anything, so I have no pressure to change my stance. I think I've convinced myself t…

Well, I think either way, Internet ads are dead for the most part. They have been dead for many years now. They started exactly the same way and went through the same flow. There were all kinds of ads: ads to install junk, ads that were totally misleading, ads that were very sexual in nature just to tempt users into clicking them, and ads that were totally irrelevant to the topic of the website or the user's interests.

But then it got so bad that people started using ad blockers long ago, and they got rid of this mess. Later, companies slowly started moving away from Internet advertising in general, and when the mobile and smartphone market started to take off, all the money flowed into that world instead. If you look at the way ads work in the mobile industry, even today, they are full of junk and incentivize users to install apps and perform specific actions. There is an equal amount of junk and misleading content in mobile ads today, like there used to be in Internet ads more than a decade ago. But right now, we are at that point. Mobile ads will also start getting muted one way or the other, and there will be huge incentive and opportunity sitting on top of that right there.

To add to this specific article, though, I would say it would have hardly made a difference anyway for the author in 2025.

Re: After 20 years I turned off Google Adsense for my websites (2025)

#30

Post by sanswork »

breput wrote: post #13

Several years ago, I ran a niche hobbyist website and incorporated Adsense (because why not?!?). The site featured a fuzzy search function since it referenced tens of thousands of named parts. The search result page would echo the (sanitized) search term followed by the matching results - along with recent search terms in the right sidebar. One day, some spambot hit the site and started searching for terms like "meso…

It's been like 10 years since I worked in the space but I'm pretty sure showing adsense on search results like that has been against the tos for a very long time unless you get a specific search feed(which is basically impossible these days and even 15 years ago was limited to companies like ask.com)
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