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Failed Experiment: Advertisement on a niche blog

This blog is a niche blog. Its topics are computer programming, mathematics, and computer hardware. Each month I have roughly one thousand real visitors reading blog posts. Posts on this blog are not dictated by any commercial requirement, they are solely governed by my current interest. It costs me money to host this blog, but it's neglible. I have a regular day-job so I am not dependent on extra income.

For almost a single month (March 2026) I presented advertisement from Google AdSense. For that time span I earned 8 cents according to Google, but which is not paid out unless you earn at least 50 dollars. The shown advertisements were about:

  1. Horoscopes
  2. Dating
  3. Travel
  4. Cars

So the shown ads were not related to the theme of this blog.

Summary of performance degradation:

  1. Page size more than doubles with ads
  2. Number of requests almost double

1. Performance with ads

2. Performance without ads

3. Conclusion

The earned money is clearly not worth the degraded performance. In light of the degradation of the performance of my site I stopped this experiment.

However, the experiment pointed out the following during the process of getting approval by Google AdSense:

  1. The posts under /music were deeemed of "low value" by Google
  2. The year overviews like /blog/2026 were also flagged as "low value"

At first, when I was rejected by Google AdSense because of "low quality" posts, I was quite embarassed. What is meant by Google AdSense here, they want blog post with "real" content and not something which is just "cheap" summary of something else. Therefore, I marked those posts as

<head>
    <meta name="robots" content="noindex">