Making my first million

AFTER reading the mention of Red Mum blog in the Sunday Tribune, the young wan jokingly (she’s very witty indeed) asked would I be giving up work to become a struggling and starving writer and well been there done that as they say and have absolutely no intention of struggling again, as far as I can help it.

We have all seen websites where they encourage you to hit on their sponsors’ websites and make them money.

And while I have seen ridiculous amounts of adverts hiding people’s blog entries, I was more than happy with my relatively clutter-free blog, probably the only thing in my life that is clutter-free.

Then one day after reading on someone’s blog that they had just received their cheque that morning and were going to use it to pay an instalment of their student loan, I thought mmmmmh, then wow, and then signed up to...



I posted my ads along the bottom of the sidebar, after choosing carefully which ones I wanted. I am sure there are more productive ways of doing it but I didn’t want them to intrude on the site too much.

So I waited to see how many millions they would make me. In the six weeks or so since I have signed up, I have made the fantastic total of $1.54c.

Google adsense pays out each time you generate sales of $100. Maybe by the time the young wan goes to college, the revenue generated by my blog will pay for her school bag!

More than likely by that time, the amount would not buy a round of drinks in Dublin judging by the rate prices are increasing here.

(As an aside, the dearest pint in Dublin has been priced at €6 in Cocoon a, boring trendy bar in Dublin co-owned by millionaire little boy racer and wannabe playboy Eddie Irvine, as if he hasn’t enough money.)

But as they say a fool and their money are soon parted. If the trendy young bucks posing in Cocoon want to splash out that amount of money on a pint after 11pm, go for it, it’ll leave all the much nicer pubs to nicer people.

And in true Billy Connolly type-form, back to Google adsense. In June there were 2,395 page impressions of my site and 24 clicks on the ads, while there were 80 queries in the search engine.

So far in July, there has been 1,708 page impressions with 49 queries and I haven’t a baldy notion what CTR is but it ain’t making me small change, let alone money.

And don’t worry I am not going to start doing what other sites do and harp on and on about clicking on the ads, it never made me want to do it, people either see something that catches their eye or they don’t.

But in the mean time, you should be dancing, yeah!


Taken on Friday night in Tetra’s, this is Tetra and the young wan having a ball. I set the camera to a two second exposure and told them to just move a lot, I also took part in the ‘fun’ and ran waving and kicking across the camera, but I was obviously too fast (call me Flo Jo) and the camera missed me.