[night-rider]

I made some money from ADs on my blog, but it was short-lived. I made ~$50.00 after a post of mine got to the HN frontpage, and spread virally on other social networks as the word got out to more people and some well-connected people amplified it even more on Twitter, Facebook, etc

After that, income was too low to do things like pay rent, go on vacation, etc It paid for the domain renewal and hosting, but that was it.

ADs were not why I blogged though. The income from ADs was a bonus but not the main focus. Of course you get people like black-hat SEO types doing content farms and gaming Google whose sole purpose is to drive impressions and get clicks on ADs.

Then there is your core visitors blocking ADs and browsing with JS disabled which further hampers income from ADs. Maybe they enjoy their privacy, and that's fine. I'm not certain the percentage of users who do that. I would guesstimate 20% are blocking, and that could increase over the years.