Chapter 5: 2011: the Year I Quit Blogging

"Wealth gotten by vanity shall be diminished: but he that gathereth by labour shall increase." -Proverbs 13:11 (KJV)

I signed up with Google Adsense and several other affiliate programmes available at the time, around 2007 onwards, and started making very little money.

I was over the moon when a few cents appeared on my Adsense account: 

"This really works." 

I was hopeful. 

Instead of leveraging this opportunity, however, I kept looking for shortcuts and did little work on my blog. I added new blogs in the process; many of which remained unfinished. I refused to work hard. I was lazy.

I wanted to be my own boss but refused to work hard to achieve that goal. 

Faithful to my daily ritual, I kept checking Google Adsense; I was delighted to see my earnings gradually approaching the $100/€70 payment threshold. 

I was aware of all my bad habits, but I kept doing things the wrong way. I wasn't just stubborn as a mule; I was worse than a mule. I admit.

I walked around proudly thinking of the money I was going to earn. I even had the audacity to blow the trumpet to announce it to my colleagues, thinking they would be delighted for me.

Little did I know that a bitter surprise was awaiting around the corner to catch me off guard. 

What a fool I was.

My Adsense earnings had reached almost $ 100/€70. There were only 50 cents left to reach the threshold before I could cash out. It was not much. The amount of money did not matter much; it could increase later; what mattered was the evidence that making money online was real. 

One early morning, sometime in March or April 2011, I logged in to my Adsense account as usual to check my earnings. 

To my surprise, my account had been disabled. 

If I had a heart condition, I would have died of a heart attack. 

What happened? 

Was this a mistake?

I logged out and back several times, hoping something would change.

Nothing did. 

I cannot describe my disappointment. I tried to figure out what had gone wrong and wondered whether I had made some technical mistake. Back then, Google provided bloggers with information on ways to improve performance and revenue, and I wondered whether I had misunderstood or done something wrong.

I contacted Google and explained the situation, but to no avail. I was told that my account had shown invalid clicks.

Google was strict about its policy against clicking your own ads. I knew this and never deliberately clicked on my own banners to earn money. I could remember clicking an ad once or twice while adding banners to my posts, simply to check whether they worked. 

Had that caused the problem?

Had I made another mistake without realising it?

I didn't know.

I searched YouTube for similar stories. I wanted to know whether other bloggers had had their AdSense accounts disabled and, more importantly, whether they had managed to get them reinstated. 

Some hadn't.

One or two apparently had. 

I tried to convince myself there were other ways to earn money through my blogs. But I had depended heavily on AdSense, and it was one of the few things that had actually delivered some results. Accepting that I could no longer rely on it was difficult. 

By then I was already sitting at the bottom of a pit created partly by my own mistakes. Losing Adsense felt as though a huge rock had been rolled over the opening.

I have had enough; I quit blogging.