One woman shop with two sites making enough to live off of Adsense alone, although I don't, because that makes me too nervous :)

One woman shop with two sites making enough to live off of Adsense alone, although I don't, because that makes me too nervous :)

Ditto, except for the woman bit. So no, not completely reliant on AdSense, but if they gave me the boot I'd certainly feel it.

Same as @ember and @robzilla. If all income streams except AdSense would stop, my two sites with AdSense will provide enough to survive. But it gives peace of mind to have eggs in several baskets. Other income streams are eCommerce, affiliate, B2B sites with subscription fees and off-line B2B work.

If all of my AdSense revenue dried up, I would not be able to survive on my paid memberships and other sources of revenue. Adsense makes up about 65-70% of my income, depending on the month.

Hello,

I have 5 sites, but 1 is earning most of my incomes. I still work on the others, with the hope they can , one day, also bring significant earnings. My main site, is 20+ years old, the others are much recent.

So far I earn enough not to worry about bills, and I saved enough during the golden age of Adsense. But I know things can change drastically from one day to another. This is why I keep my expenses as low as possible,and the reason I never hired anyone, worrying that, one day, I can no longer afford them.

@JorgeV

You’re smart! I could pay my bills for over a year, maybe two, with no income because of doing the same; saving during the Adsense heyday. For me that was 2014-2017.

I also socked money away during the Adsense gravy train days, for me 2008-2014 or so. Glad I did because that money is going to pay for my retirement.

Good for everybody who has been a one person band. I'd be pleased if I could earn $20 a week from one site.

To be honest, being long in the game helps. One of the two sites is older than Google. The other site is 13 years old. Unicorns which pop up and are able to become self-sufficient with AdSense in a very short time are rare.

Last week I removed AdSense from two sites on which I had used it for nearly two years. Despite decent traffic the ads never earned more than a dollar per month. For the same reason I removed AdSense from three other sites a few years ago. Some site types simply do not convert well with AdSense.

I tried lost in space, but there are sites already there but no ads on them. I tried a site to do with changes in the employment sector, more automated services for several months.

If you suggest you need to have a site up for three years, well, that isn't practical, considering it costs to do that. It isn't worth the long term expense, even if cheap, for no success with the adsense program.

A forum may be better, but again there are so many out there that may have the traffic and the ads established.

Hello,

This is off-topic , but to answer @futureautomation.

How long did it take for companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook, eBay, etc.. to become profitable?

Also, Adsense is not the only way to earn money online. This is the most popular, because it's the "easiest" to use, and access. But, as you grow traffic, other opportunities of monetizing your content, can appear.

Keep in mind that, today, when you create a site, there are certainly plenty of others, in the same niche, and the more the time pass, the more there are sites. So, of -course , it's more difficult than in the past.

@futureautomation

I disagree. You have to think long term because unless you are a large corporation with deep pockets, the days of instant Adsense success for a website are over.

The website that I am living off of now did not explode until many years after I started it. At the time, I was not thinking about making a living from it, I was just thinking about building the best website. Now I’ve been living off of that website since 2014.

I am not sure how much you want to make, but I also have smaller websites that I started a few years ago they now make a few hundred dollars a month each. These are websites that require no maintenance.

Think long term. It helps if you own your own servers and can build a website anytime you want with no cost other than your time.

I have simply setup a few domains and one hosting account, I tried the first one for three and a half months in total, not in one ago. And another about seven months.

If you suggest keep the longest going for a year, which i then turned into a forum, but either way, I think it wasn't going to work out, because trying beyond that time frame wasn't what I had in mind. Bare in mind, my info is from youtube, one is Professor Ron, and the others were a couple of blokes who have been in the game more than a decade back, when they were much younger.

They suggest half a year, and Ron suggests one year, clearly they both would mean with twenty 2,000 word articles over that time frame. Not a site with four or five or six pages that add up to two or three articles with that amount of words.

Another service offers one year and a domain, so for political history, that isn't a bad subject, there are sites with google ads.

But sure the primary or only aim was to see if google adsense would approve. It is worth a try, regardless of the result. It is a long shot from reading people's experiences here.

Don't believe what you hear and see on Youtube. These so-called experts often earn their money by selling courses to you, not by actually making much money on their own on the Internet.

Hmm, well that was where i got my interest to try.

I did register a history facts domain in Feb so if I decide not to purchase again the current name I am using with the first hosting service which is paid per month, I got a deal for one year domain and hosting. Then I can try something that would have more content, than what I can think of, using various examples, and what I know just myself on the subject.

Youtube is another way to earn via adsense, but the difference is, that requires 1,000 hours of videos viewed, and 1,000 subscribers, so the website option is easiest, in comparison. But like with any of these ventures, those who are earning did so a good several years back.

And sure the question about companies who begin, well they are companies, an individual starting a site for the adsense program is just one person, so that isn't a good comparison. Those individuals started in groups, and some had capital.

When you already have secured hosting and a domain name, the only other investment is time. Just as @gatormark I started the AdSense sites without thinking about money. In fact, when I started one of the sites, there wasn't any AdSense yet.

Every investment you do now can bring you money perpetually. Some pieces of text I wrote in the previous century still earn me daily money now.

But if you don't start, you'll never know.

I agree with @lammert. Pay little to no attention to the Youtubers.

A good approach to take is to study the top three websites in the industry or niche and try to make your website better than those.

This, of course, requires a lot of time and focus on that particular niche. It will also take consistent attention for a few years, IMO.

There is no quick money in this game these days.

I appreciate the input.

I am going to have to consider whether to want to continue paying the hosting for the current one I have up. If you are on the low side of the ladder, just spending money monthly isn't something you need to do.

A few years isn't what I had in mind, considering I got my info from those clips last year, and even a few web pages, that generally recommend, a half year old site, and try to keep it up to date as much as possible, but not spam like content.

Hello,

If "Get rich fast" videos, books, articles were accurate, everybody would be rich :)

As said above, I did also started without the goal of making money, I've been doing sites, first to learn myself web design, and with the idea to share things with others. Then it happened that, with the time, some of these sites, were popular enough to earn money.

So, I don't think you can make plans, you do your site(s), and see how it turns.

Or, if you have a, what you believe is a killing idea/concept, then, you can look for business angels, to finance you.

Google has some sort of standard, not everybody can simply have some small earnings from them.

If I could of made $4 a week, I'd of consider that a success.

Sure, but many on here are probably not under thirty two years of age or thirty. So the option to setup a site and make some small change doesn't exist as noted.

There appears to be a mindset disconnect in good part because of survivor bias and hazy memories. Go back ten or fifteen years in the WebmasterWorld archives and be amazed/shocked at the number of webdevs asking why they are not in the AdSense UPS club, why they are struggling to make tens of dollars a month revenue.

Yes, as in every gold rush the early webdev birds were more likely to strike it rich but even then the majority did not. And the arbitrage shills holding up their monthly cheques never ever did the same with their AdWords bills...

Those heady times are long gone, a decade or more into the past. The web including the web ad/af revenue models are mature business models not gold rushes. Enterprise dominates. Niches are filled.

As such the small business startup dynamics hold: two to three years average to ‘ramen profitability’, three to five years average to ‘comfortable living profitability’.

Yes, it can be be achieved faster than average, by definition half do. The more knowledgeable, the more experienced the more likely. But, reverse case the failure drop out rate is, as it always has been, high; perhaps half gone by two years, eighty percent gone by five...

In the past few years I’ve seen sites become ‘profitable’ in six to eight months, more commonly eight to fourteen, however they have been founded by folks who ‘do it right’. Yes, the actual overhead is minimal compared to a B&M but the same mature nay saturated market business rules apply: established competitors have the advantage, and will, statistically speaking, eat your - non-free - lunch.

The new (last five to ten years) web gold rush has not been in the website space at all, rather in leveraging a cross selection of SM sites to build a presence and an audience. However, here too survivorship bias and influencer shills loom large. And this methodology too is now fast maturing/plateauing...

Gold rushes are exciting their failures dramatic, business is dull it’s failures poignant. In both the percentage who succeed is a fraction those who do not. The dream, however, lives on.

I most definitely am a one man shop and have been for 15 years or so.

Realistically I now have only one website earning from Adsense. Two previous websites have, several years ago, have been incorporated into my main website. I have two more websites on separate subjects but I just keep them ticking over in case the main website fails. A backup.

Yes. I could easily live off the Adsense earnings from my website in combination with my pensions. I could probably just live off my pensions in reality. But Adsense is a huge contributor to my income. It has been that way for many years.

I also have a few affiliate sources of income which don't quite equal the Adsense income but they are not that far away from it. If Adsense folded it would not be the end of my financial world by any means.

One man shop here with one website.

I started it as a bit of fun and it was on Blogger originally. Moved to Wordpress and started taking it more seriously. Think I was accepted to Adsense about 18 months after I setup original site (I really didn't know what I was doing).

My traffic was decent but it wasn't making what I thought it should for the traffic (plus all the "you should be making x from your site if you get these figures" articles).

Seem to remember (about 3 years ago?) making changes with more ad units etc and tweaking a few things and since that time it has been decent enough money - not quite enough to live off but fairly respectable. I certainly missed the aforementioned golden age which was a shame.

Still proud of my efforts some 9 years from when I originally started.

For the record, I had many websites fail back in the Adsense heyday. I just did not have the time nor desire to focus on them.

Frankly, I can think of two websites in particular that I wish I had kept. I think they would be doing well right now. But when I started this game I was working full time too so my bandwidth was limited.

The key, IMO, is not to spread yourself thin. Do take on too many projects. In fact, try to get one website up and running within a few years to where it’s your cash cow and pays for your servers, etc. Focus, focus, focus on one site. Build it from the ground up and make that website GREAT!

Then, you can create more websites.

Hello,

+1 with @gatormark.