Google AdSense

I was clicking buttons in my blog control section and discovered that it became eligible for AdSense.

For those of you who don't know, AdSense is Google's advertising scheme for content creators like bloggers and YouTubers. Basically, joining AdSense allows Google to place advertisements on your blog or YouTube videos, and you get a slice of the revenue generated by those advertisements.

I was a bit surprised that my blog is qualified to be part of AdSense. It doesn't get any web traffic and my viewership numbers are in single digits. My mailing list has four subscribers of which two are my parents. All in all, it really is my little dusty corner of the internet, only of interest to myself and a few people close to me and literally no one else in the world.

But Google's artificial intelligence (AI) apparently thinks putting ads in my little dusty corner would be a worthwhile venture. I'm flattered. Not! I think it goes to show that AI is overrated and there's nothing like human judgement.

I won't sign up for AdSense. It's not that I don't want the money. Of course I want the money! But it just makes no sense (pun not intended) at all for me to register.

With such low readership, I would earn a few cents a month. AdSense will only transfer money into my bank account if it owes me a lump sum of SGD150. I might not even get paid in my lifetime!

Furthermore, even if I wanted to use AdSense, I wouldn't know how to because this banking thing is beyond my comprehension. I rarely interact with money in either physical or virtual form, so it kind of intimidates me when I have to read about, think about, or otherwise deal with money in any way. And I don't even know my own bank account details.

I mentioned before that this blog will not be monetised and remain purely a hobby. I won't lie though, when I saw the AdSense option, I was tempted. Why not earn a bit of passive income for something I enjoy doing? But then I realised how silly the idea is, and immediately discarded it.

This blog will stay as a fun personal project on the side. I'll go look for money elsewhere.