Musings & Thoughts for Tuesday, September 6, 2022, or: After 11 Years, My Blogger Blog FINALLY Starts Paying Out

Well, it finally happened.

Last night, while I was doing my weekly look at the AdSense account of the Blogger precursor to this blog, I noticed that after 11 years and 1,404 blog posts, I finally reached the $100 payment threshold necessary for Google to pay me the ad revenue generated by my content on the original A Certain Point of View.

According to my AdSense account, my current balance – as of September 6, 2022 – is $104.47, which reflects ad-generated revenue up to August 31 of this year.

I am, of course, quite happy about this. I linked my blog to AdSense several years ago – I was still living in Miami and taking on the role of caregiver for my sick mother at the time – with the intention of making at least a little extra money from my writing. And even though I couldn’t devote much time to A Certain Point of View until after my mom died in July of 2015, I never lost hope that someday, somehow, I’d reach the $100 payment threshold.

I was a bit surprised by the modest but steady increase in pageviews (and AdSense earnings) on A Certain Point of View. Yes, it’s been active for 11 years and until March of 2020 it was my only blog, and at one point before some Trump supporters managed to get Facebook to ban it as “spammy” or because I “hurt their feelings” with some of my politically themed posts, it was getting a lot of visitors.

According to the Statistics page on Blogger, my page views reached past the 74,000-views mark twice in 2019; first on September 30, then again on November 30.

And if I had not been forced by that stupid, arbitrary, and unfair ban from Facebook, I would not have created this WordPress blog, and most of the posts you’ve read here would have appeared on the original A Certain Point of View. (There is, after all, a reason why I named this blog A Certain Point of View, Too).

What surprises me about the “passed the $100 payment threshold” thing is that even though I planned to find a way to write on both blogs regularly – one scheme I had involved writing on one blog on alternate days of the week. You know, like posting on Blogger on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and on WordPress on Tuesday, Thursday, and on weekends.

Alas, I am not that good at setting schedules or keeping to them, and because I actually have more reader interactions here than on Blogger, I ended up writing on WordPress every day, thus switching the roles of the two blogs. So, despite the “this is a subsidiary blog” vibe of the title A Certain Point of View,Too, this blog became my main one, whilst the older Blogger edition took on the lesser status of being the “auxiliary blog.”

I still publish content on A Certain Point of View to keep it on life support, as it were, and maybe if I had more than 24 followers and 74 valid comments on Blogger, I’d be more inclined to post a bit more frequently than once or twice a month.

Heck, if Meta – Facebook’s parent company – had a better and fairer appeals system and I could get the ban on A Certain Point of View lifted, I’d go ahead and make it my main blog again. But that’s not going to happen; if I can’t get the appeal board to rescind a simple issue of a removed post because a bot – a bot! – thinks I violated Facebook’s nebulous “community standards,” I can’t get it to reverse the far more serious step of blocking my Blogger site from “the Social Network.”

(The Facebook ban is so total that were I to link anything from A Certain Point of View here so you could go there from WordPress, this post would be blocked. That’s how restrictive the ban is. And all because a few Trump supporters – especially one in particular that some people who know him from Epinions gave him the nickname “Papa Smurf” – couldn’t handle some inconvenient truths about their beloved Dear Leader in a few fact-based posts.)

So, even if I’m paying WordPress more per year to host this blog than I am making through the ads on my posts, you, Dear Reader, are stuck with me for a long time. I’m used to the process of publishing, and like I said, I have more followers and get more comments here than I do on Blogger.

And, who knows? Maybe someday I’ll make enough money through WordPress ads to at least pay for the hosting fees!