alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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Slightly off-topic, but several small-to-medium Youtube channels I watch, mentioned that their yearly Youtube earnings are way down, by two-thirds in one case. It may be that Alphabet is dialing back their profit sharing - across the board.
adsense isn't the only ad network around, you could probably switch to another one and make a bit more.
I had a similar setup a few years back, initially I got a small amount of revenue, but over time things really dropped off.
Despite increasing visitors I was getting less and less income from the adverts, so I too chose to disable them.
I knew it was coming, because even ten years ago I was running an adblocker for myself, but it was still a surprise how quickly it came about for the average Joe.