I Stopped Showing Google Adsense Ads On My Website

Who Am I Kidding?

Showing ads on this website was supposed to be a way to make back a tiny bit of what I spend to keep the site running, but all it does is slow it down. I had already limited the ads to a handful of places, with maybe one or two tops showing on those pages. But this site gets so little traffic that there really was no point. On a good day, I was making a couple of pennies from showing the ads. It’s not worth the trouble.

I could plaster ads like I do on a few of my other sites and make a little more, but honestly, I just don’t want to. This site is, above all else, a development site. I placed the ads manually where I wanted them to go, and they just cluttered up the code. Sure, I could create a function to inject the ads myself with one simple variable, but again—I just don’t want to.

Besides, Wisedocks just looks so much better without ads breaking up the content. This is a dark-themed website, so if you’re actually reading through the site and come across a bright, flashing ad, it really detracts from the experience.

Will I ever add them back? You bet your ass I will if the site ever gains any real traction. But I don’t see that happening anytime… ever. I think I made a post last year about taking down ads, and somewhere along the way, I brought them back. I don’t think that particular post survived the many migrations this site has gone through.

I do think I will leave one ad up on the famous quotes pages for now and I may add them back to some of the tools such as the QR Code builder and the WebP image converter page. If traffic ever picks up for those pages. But the blog is the main focus and gets more traffic at the moment so I will leave it ad-free.

Let Them Do The Work

My other websites get much more traffic and make almost enough to buy me a coffee now and then. So, I’ll just let those sites carry the load while I use Wisedocks to play around with my codebase. Speaking of which, I think it’s time to get started on my admin area layout.

Admin Area

I built and designed my admin area with my computer in mind since I do all my work on a PC. There wasn’t any reason to make the layout responsive. But now I find myself having to delete spam and hateful content on FartDump nearly every day, and I’m usually doing it on my phone.

I’ve also been working on a couple of websites for other people, using some of my codebase and the admin layout. It got me thinking: I really need to make the admin area much more responsive for smaller screens.

New Project?

One of the websites I started this week is for a local real estate agent. I spent the last few days working on the foundation of the site—building out functions and basic template layouts. I haven’t spent much time on styling yet since I figured I’d wait until I had something to show them and get their feedback. I uploaded the project to my staging site and sent a link this morning… but no response, lol.

I’m having fun with it, though, so if the client backs out, I think I’ll tweak the layout into something more generic and keep building. With most of the groundwork already laid, it shouldn’t be too much trouble to turn this into a bonafide web app.

Before I got started, I visited a bunch of real estate websites from all over the country, and you know what I noticed? They’re slow as hell.

Think about it: How many real estate agents do you know? There are over 2 million in America, and they all need websites. Some spend thousands to have them built, some try to make their own (usually with WordPress, from what I’ve seen), but there are many that just don’t have the time to deal with it. They need an easy-to-use web app that’s personalized to host their listings.

That’s where I have an advantage over most companies offering these services—I’m cheap. If you were a real estate agent and I offered you a personalized website where you could host your own listings for, I don’t know, $5 a month, who wouldn’t jump on that?

It’s just a thought, but I plan to keep building this app. It’s database-heavy, which is right up my alley.