Did Shareaholic eat my viewers?

Quite some time ago when I became disillusioned with Adwords and the general Google universe I installed Shareaholic on this blog (and my other sites).

I don’t depend on the revenue the sites generate (none, by the way) but I was hoping to get a bit more reach through some of the magic that was promised.

My Shareaholic experience?

Continue reading Did Shareaholic eat my viewers?

Travel Blogging: Skeptics Unite

Ive already expressed my skepticism of the “Blogger Dream” – and gone a little ways to describing some of the pitfalls and pittances it can earn.  However I still enjoy reading about the dream and occasionally have fantasies about getting rich quick.

Travel Blogging is hard?

I suppose it is, in fact like most creative pursuits it takes time and effort to plan, write and post content that will attract and maintain an audience that’s also willing to follow up with Facebook Likes or Retweets.  Although the best perspective I’ve seen thrown on it comes from Theodora at escapeartistes.com

It’s not subsistence farming in a drought. It’s not child protection or first response. It’s not labouring in the sewers, in a sweatshop, or on zero-hours contracts at the minimum wage. Nor is it rocket science, the SAS or brain surgery.

She then goes on to point out the low barrier to entry, hey I meet all of that, well except maybe the high-spec photographic equipment and I’m only partially convinced of my own delusions of grandeur.

Really there’s more, lots more, but you should really pop over to her nicely detailed post on “Why I’ll Never be a Professional Travel Blogger” and then think about what you’re reading when Zite, News360 or Flipboard throws you yet another tantalising story of how some witty hipster has travelled the world for free.

Yes my friends, they may not have spent much money to get around the world but their credibility is traded the moment they don’t declare the true financial link to what they’re reviewing.

The Blogger Dream crushed by AdSense

It was in January I decided to share my amazement at how people could travel and live worldwide without a “real job”.

Then in August I shared my successes with the Adsense income I was generating through YouTube and a few other sites. By that point I was hitting around 7 cents a day. Not exactly rolling in the cashola.

So have I made it to the big leagues in the last 5 months?

In short, no, not even close.

Instead I’ve joined what seems like thousands of small volume bloggers and content producers who are dropped from the AdSense program by Google for some non-specified breach on the month a long earned payout threshold is reached.  That was it, I completed the review process trying to eek out a specific reason, but none was forthcoming.  could I have clicked on an Advert while watching on of my YouTube videos?  Maybe I wasn’t supposed to have Skimlinks running at the same time?

I just don’t know.

So guess I will have to move on from the easy wins of a passive advertising income until a viable replacement for AdSense crops up.  There are a few but lets just say I’m fussy and I also like the idea of finding a program with a lower payout threshold to be sure I don’t spend years driving clicks that someone is getting paid for only to never see my share.  You see that’s the real scam here, Google sold ads on my sites to advertisers for years, and do you think in 2014 they’re going to refund the advertisers who paid for displays on ausmicro.com back in the day?  Nope, so they win and I (and every other content producer) get screwed.  Not really impressed.

Screw you Google AdSense

The time has come to move on – it’s likely I won’t ever utilize a Google AdSense program as an advertiser or as a content producer, well definitely not as a content producer, supposedly once the account is locked it can’t be unlocked, but yet because its never deleted its a breach of their T&C to create another.

 

Oh well back to the “Get rich quick drawing board”