Goodbye Adsense! You (Mostly) Failed to Pay Your Way
06 June 2026
Yesterday I did something I’ve been considering doing for a long time—I removed all Google Adsense ads from the site. Adsense accepted my site more than 19 years ago, and I began running ads on my pages straight away. At the time, there was a lot of talk about how much money people could make from Adsense, and, indeed, many people were doing very well with Google’s groundbreaking contextual advertising—and getting rich! It didn’t work like that for me.
At the time, this was a low-traffic website, getting very few visitors a day, but it didn’t have many pages and wasn’t an established site. I also had a blog, hosted on a separate domain. It got considerably more traffic than A Passion for Horror, and had Adsense ads on it as well, but even on a good week, I was lucky to earn a few pence. The bottom line is, despite all my efforts with on-page and off-page SEO, I could never get Adsense to work for me.
But that was okay, I saw myself playing a long game. I thought if I persisted, and kept creating content, the site would get more visitors and my Adsense earnings would improve. I hoped that, at least, I may earn enough to cover my hosting costs—and one year I did. One year! That was all, and it was thanks to the traffic I got to a single page, over a couple of days.
I’d read James Herbert’s book The Secret of Crickley Hall, written a review, and added it to the site [archived page]. The review had been on the site for a long time and contained a couple of Adsense Ads. Back then I used to log into my Adsense account on a daily basis, sometimes at night, at other in the morning, depending on what shift pattern I was working. Most days showed zero clicks and zero earnings, but some days I made a few pence and, once or twice as much as £1. I could see the page impressions as well, in the form of a graph.
On the day in question, as soon as I logged in, my eyes nearly popped out of my head. There was a massive spike on the graph. It showed my site had generated more than 1,000 ad impressions the day before, and earned over £100 in a single day. I couldn’t believe it! So I did some checks and discovered most of those visitors had arrived at the site via my review of The Secret of Crickley Hall. I wanted to know why, did a quick Google search, and discovered the BBC had dramatized the book as a 3-episode TV series that was going to air soon. This had caused a lot of people to become curious about The Secret of Crickley Hall and begin searching online for information. At the time my review of the book was at the top of Google’s search engine results page (SERP), so many of those curious people clicked through and read my review. Presumably, a good number of them clicked ads as well, and the next day it happened again, though to a lesser extent. If I remember correctly, I made around £40 that day. Then it was back to low page impressions and a few pence here and there. That was in 2012.
I didn’t give up. I kept at it, improved the site, continued adding content, and A Passion for Horror presently has more than 1,900 pages that bring in a decent number of daily visitors, some of whom stay on the site for an hour or longer, exploring the content. But as my site improved and brought in more visitors, Google made some changes that caused it to become harder and harder to make money with Adsense. Since 2012, I have received a few more payments, but it generally takes me 18 months to 2 years to reach the payment threshold of £60. It costs me three times that each year to host the site.
Of course, there are things I could have done to slightly improve my Google Adsense revenue, such as squeeze ads in between every single paragraph—Have you noticed how many sites are doing that these days? I hate it—pages and pages of thin content that seems to only be there to hang adverts from. I want visitors to my site to have a good experience, so I’ve never done that, and never will. Nor did I allow Google to take control of things and decide where the ads should go. I aimed for no more than one to two ads per page—one near the top and one at the bottom, often dispensing with the one near the top if the page content was too low.
Sixty pounds every two years or so, is better than nothing, but those ads came at a price. I regularly use a third-party service to check my site performance, and where necessary try to improve things. When I do the checks, more often than not, I have found the JavaScript from the Adsense ads slows things down. I’ve also noticed a lot of ads I don’t want on my site, often featuring people that appear to be doing sexual acts. These ads are obviously intended to work as clickbait, and it’s probably not entirely Google’s fault, but I don’t see the point of having ads that slow down my site and may offend some of my site visitors. Especially not when the revenue is so low, and appears to be gradually dropping instead of increasing.
Now the ads are gone, the site seems a little leaner and cleaner. The page transitions may also be slightly faster. I’ve certainly seen a minor improvement in my site performance scores for both desktop and mobile. If I can find a suitable advertising partner to work with in the future, I may include an ad or two on the pages, but I’m fussy. I need to be able to present the right kind of ads—ones that are a good match for the interests of site visitors. At the moment A Passion for Horror is 100% ad-free. I’ve also removed the Ko-Fi tip button from the side bar, and not without good reason, but that’s another story, for another day.
~~~
