Housekeeping: A little Google Ad flavor for you morning milk?

Not sure if you noticed but we added ads! Just kidding, it is pretty hard not to notice (and is kind of annoying the bejeezus out of us). We are using Google Adsense on our site which is currently set to automatic ads. We don’t actually know how to turn it on manual ads (or even if that is possible) so we are figuring all that jazz out right now. It will probably take a minute.

In an ideal ad world, we would like to only have ads on our sidebar (if you view on a computer) and after every 3-4 posts (if you view on a cell phone). But auto-ads means that Google scans your site and just places ads wherever it wants to, so color us surprised when we logged in today and saw a bunch of ads all over the place. We were happy that it worked (whoo hoo!) and at the same time, overwhelmed at how different our once very clean site looked (aw man~).

On the bright side, we are taking the proper steps to cover the cost of our host which makes us super happy. If you would like to help out then the best way to help support us is to turn off your ad blocker on our site by whitelisting it.

Also, if you notice any weird ads or if our page is loading extra slowly then please let us know so we can try to address it!

Okay, now we are back off to try to figure all this out!

PS. Does anyone know anything about 2018 Google ads and would like to tell us all about it?

UPDATES! UPDATES! UPDATES!

Okay, we tried out Google ads, Spoutable ads, and Teads ads so I am here to report on them all! Just for fyi purposes, we are on the hunt to make enough money to take care of our expenses to run this site. The largest expense by far is our server which is $150/month. The good news is that Google ads looks like it is kind of sort of covering that. The bad news is that we had to turn off Google ads for the moment. I’ll get into that more below.

Google Ads – This one is actually the best money-maker for us. Though it is also the one that provides the most clutter on our site. With Google ads we were making about $3 a day and on some days we might make a little bit more or a little bit less depending on how many people come to the site and how many of those people use ad blocking software.

So for instance, What’s Wrong With Secretary Kim has a lot of interest, so we might make $10 during those two airings ($20 total). But every other drama day is more like $3-5.

We turned off Google ads for the time being because we were getting some warnings on people clicking our site too often. We feel this is because we update posts every ten minutes so people are clicking to see if there are any updates. We are super cool with that but it does not look like Google likes that, so we will need to email them to explain the situation because we realize our site is not the normal type of site. However, Google ads is known for not being responsive and for shutting off accounts suddenly so that is why we just removed all the ads until we address it.

One solution is to possibly only include our Google ads on the Homepage and not on any other page. That will definitely affect the amount of money we make so we’ll just have to see what happens.

Another option we have is to join another ad network, so we’ll look into that.

Spoutable ads – These ads were the ones that popped up at the top of the page and showed random posts from all the cesspool that is on the internet. Can you tell that I did not like them that much? I was willing to stick with them if they brought in a good amount of money and could be a possible Google ads replacement, but they only gave us ~0.50 cents per day, so we only made $7 in two weeks.

Yeah, pretty paltry.

So since we already did not like these ads and they brought in basically no money, we decided to get rid of them. Bye, Felicia.

Teads ads – Love, love, love Teads ads. These are the video ads that pop up every now and again. Y’all, I love them so much. I love how they are pretty seamless ads that don’t show up all the time. Yet they bring in a good amount of money with only one ad. We are getting about $1-3 per day with Teads ads and that is with only one ad running that only pops up in content and sometimes on the homepage every blue moon.

Has anyone seen the Teads ads? They are the video ads and sometimes non video ads in content. We still have these ads running. We are going to try to only keep these ads running to see if we can possibly make enough money to maintain this site. The only problem is that to get paid by Teads, the entire ad has to be watched. So thank you to everyone that watches our Teads ads!

It would help us out a lot if (anyone who wants to) turned off their ad blocker on this site and/or whitelisted us, especially since we only have one ad running now. You might not even see the Teads ad because it is like spotting a Leprechaun. I actually get excited when I see it.

Amazon & Ebay Affiliate links – These are pretty great because we can kind of control them and they don’t disappear with ad blocking software. We actually don’t get any money if you see an affiliate, we only get a commission if you purchase the item that we recommend. The commission is low (4-10%) but we’re still happy with it.

Our shop is an affiliate shop, so if you see something you like and you purchase something from it, then you will be helping us out! We are playing around with the placement of items in our shop right now; we have our Shop! link on the header, but we also have some items in our sidebar as well as after the first, second, and third posts on the homepage.

I will most likely calm that down a bit as I get used to affiliate links and adjust how we want them displayed on our site. So we might only put them after the first post instead of the first three and keep one in our sidebar and footer. But I’m not sure, I’m sleuthing it out as we speak!

So far this month we have made $51.13 on Amazon and nothing on Ebay. But we have also only been on Ebay for one week. We love how this shop experiment is going so far because we think (hopefully soon) our Amazon + our Teads ads should cover at least our largest expense (our server). Whoo Hoo!

Our other affiliates (that we recommend in our sidebar and have used) are Picmonkey, Grammarly, and Bluehost. Picmonkey is what we use to edit all our photos, Grammarly is what we sometimes use to quickly fix our spelling & grammar mistakes when we actually have time to do it, and Bluehost was our much loved host for one year. We loved them all and recommend using them.

iTunes Affiliate – We used to use iTunes as an affiliate. It worked well as far as people being interested in a song, but we only got ~6% on a 0.99 cent purchase. In addition to that, it would take hours to add all the iTunes links so we decided it just wasn’t worth it.

You also have to make $100 to be paid by iTunes which is an uphill battle. We have only made $42.30 after 7 months of doing it so we calculate that it will take a little over 21 more months to be paid our first $100 (we did make iTunes $438.47 in seven months, though). So we decided to just eighty-six iTunes and use YouTube links for our music posts only. It stinks that we won’t ever see that money, but it was worthwhile to try it out.

So in total here is what we have made in about 7 months of affiliate links and 6 weeks of Ad hosting:

Google Ads = ~$112 (~6 weeks, but we removed them from our site for now)
Spoutable Ads = $7.02 (two weeks)
Teads Ads = $23.49 (two weeks, love them)
Amazon Affiliate = $102 (~2 months)
iTunes Affiliate = $42.30 (7 months)
Grand Total = $244.51

Okay, you are now an expert on all the ads we have used on this site. We hope it has helped someone out on what ads they might try to use on their site! If you have any questions, let us know, we’re happy to answer them. ^_^

PS. Whitelist us! Then you can see our Teads Leprechaun!