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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

I have a tool on my website that gets about 250k unique views per day. During COVID I decided to put a single ad on the page to try to make up for my wife's lost income. It was for a time bringing in close to $500 a month, and was a nice little side income.

My wife never returned to work, we had kids and she has stayed at home with them. As such the ad has stayed up. Last I checked though it is bringing in something like $36 a month despite traffic being higher than ever. I get a payout from Google every couple months.

I'm considering taking it down just because the payoff is so low. It's honestly barely breaking even with the added expense of complicating my taxes.

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Slightly off-topic, but several small-to-medium Youtube channels I watch, mentioned that their yearly Youtube earnings are way down, by two-thirds in one case. It may be that Alphabet is dialing back their profit sharing - across the board.

This is because of Gemini/Claude/ChatGPT

People are using AI as a search engine.

https://www.semrush.com/blog/ai-search-seo-traffic-study/

https://searchengineland.com/how-googles-ai-overviews-are-ac...

That is true i'm sure. But in this particular case, there is no search or AI directly involved. It's the ads that get inserted to Youtube videos, and what they pay to creators.

Creator-led channels are competing with AI-generated video channels that pump out many videos every day. The ad spend hasn't increased but now it's shared with people who have automated their channel's content production and who are likely getting the majority of what's available.

That's to be expected. Google needs that money to fund the AI development that will enable them to replace creators with their own slop, allowing them to pocket 100 % instead of sharing anything at all.

Exactly, it is already a pattern that Google will start paying good money for ads and then progressively reduce the pay to its publishers. It is a bait and switch strategy, but they'll certainly say that it is just an algorithm improvement....

Totally an organic and transparent marketplace that joins together publishers and consumers huh?

It has been down since the COVID boom for obvious reasons, and then it has gone even more.. Google needing the billions to put into the AI burner is just and unfortunate coincidence..

I had a similar setup a few years back, initially I got a small amount of revenue, but over time things really dropped off.

Despite increasing visitors I was getting less and less income from the adverts, so I too chose to disable them.

I knew it was coming, because even ten years ago I was running an adblocker for myself, but it was still a surprise how quickly it came about for the average Joe.

adsense isn't the only ad network around, you could probably switch to another one and make a bit more.

Or find out who advertises on your site and approach them directly about sponsorship.

Yeah, but that's actually hard work, adding in a different network is easy.

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