I put AdSense on my blog about two years ago. I haven’t really been looking at it very often, but I just took a look, and I’m now up to $2.99 in earnings. It looks like Google doesn’t pay out until you reach $100, if I understand their chart correctly, so I guess I won’t actually see any money from them until about 50 years from now, if my current rate of earning remains constant. In terms of hits, I’m averaging about a dozen per day, most of which are probably bots.
Of course, my intention with this blog is not to make money. I recently started reading John Scalzi’s Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded, a collection of some of his blog posts, so this has gotten me to thinking a bit about the purpose of keeping up a blog. I’ve been blogging for longer than most people (since 2001), and I’ve been doing it with some consistency. My purpose has been, variously: to make note of certain events in my life, for future reference; to post information that may be helpful for anyone who happens to stumble across it; and to, in general, have an online “home” where people can find me and see a bit of what I’ve been up to.
Other sites have popped up to assume some of these roles of course. Facebook is the online “home” for most people, where their friends can find them and keep up with them, and where they can post photos, funny links, and whatnot. StackOverflow, Code Project, and similar sites offer a way for a programmer to give back to the community by posting useful information and sharing code. But I still think it’s a good idea to keep a blog going, especially when you’ve already been doing it for so long.