

Dropping Adsense - Saying Goodbye to $100K Per Year in Easy Income - hhm
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2008/10/dropping-adsense-saying-goodbye-to-100k-per-year-in-easy-income/

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cbrinker
Never heard of the guy before. I checked out his bio on Wikipedia and it says
this:

"After being arrested for grand theft in Sacramento, CA and given 60 hours of
community service, Steve claims that this was the impetus he needed to turn
his life around. He claims to have earned two college degrees in three
semesters from California State University, Northridge - he says that he
partly achieved this by attending a college that was generous in awarding
advanced placement credits for courses he had taken in high school, thus
reducing his required course."

The citation links to his article where he claims he did 30-40 units per
semester and no summer school. I don't know, that sounds pretty ridiculous to
me. Very hard for me to believe he earned 2 degrees in 3 semester on technical
subjets of mathematics and comp sci.

~~~
jodrellblank
Never heard of you before. I checked your bio on Wikipedia and you don't have
one. Sounds pretty ridiculous to me. Very hard for me to believe you're even a
real person.

Casting aspersions on his character? Why? It's very hard for me to believe
people can know enough to earn a Nobel Prize for Physics, but they do.

See: [http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/12/rules-are-no-
obstac...](http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/12/rules-are-no-obstacles-
for-committed-people/) for how he did it.

~~~
cbrinker
I'm not the one going around claiming to have done certain things that are
rather ridiculous to believe without seeing a legit degree and a student
record. Forgive my skepticism.

There are a lot of snake-oil salesmen out there that are going to sucker you
in with their smooth words. Hey, if he writes about things and it helps you,
that's great. Still doesn't convince me he graduated with 2 degrees in 3
semesters. It does convince me he knows how to make some money, though.

Even if you had nothing better to do in your life at that time, taking on
30-40 units is beyond a full time job. You'd litterally be looking at
something like 60-80 hours of work a week. That's unreasonable by any
standard. It's just like some other articles posted on here saying, working
super long hours and little sleep isn't something that is productive or
something worth bragging about.

Also, after reading through some of his articles he doesn't sound like a very
logical person. I won't argue with results, but some things said on their
don't exactly vibe with reason imo.

~~~
jodrellblank
I notice I am jumping overly to his defense when I have no reason to other
than that I like his writings.

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Jasber
Steve is a great guy and some of his work really resonates with me:

\- [http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/05/how-to-become-an-
ea...](http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/05/how-to-become-an-early-riser/)

\- <http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep/>

\- [http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/08/the-law-of-
attracti...](http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/08/the-law-of-attraction/)

But lately his stuff seems too "out there"--even for me. I fully respect what
he does, but his way of life seems too extreme for me.

~~~
sireat
Steve has a lot of great motivational posts, has been a hacker/indie developer
himself and seems to be a rational guy for the most part. However, he has
those "full of crazy" posts, plus I do wonder whether he really believes his
wife's job: <http://www.erinpavlina.com/> Anyhow, I am sure he will do alright
without Adsense.

~~~
menloparkbum
_has been a hacker/indie developer himself_

has anyone ever played the game (Dweep) he supposedly made all his money off
of?

~~~
potatolicious
There are _tons_ of little indie games nobody's ever heard of that's made
people rich. I know a guy who made a pretty simple persistent Flash drag
racing game (i.e. your car customizations stick around between visits) and
pulls in mid-6-figures a year.

Maybe I'm in the wrong field...

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potatolicious
Good for him :) It takes balls to just pull all ads off your site. That being
said, how in the world does a guy get $100K+ a year from AdSense? My blog got
Slashdotted (and reddit'ed) a while back and I think I made <$1 that whole day
(while serving some 200K+ views)... Even multiply that by 100x that readership
(20M a day?!) wouldn't make the math work...

~~~
imp
I was curious also so I ran some numbers:

He's the #1 search result for "personal development", which averages 90,500
searches per month from Google. Assuming he receives 60% of those visits,
that's 54,300 visits per month. Since it's search traffic, which would be
people willing to click and look for info, he might get a CTR of 2%, which is
1,086 clicks per month. The estimated CPC for that term is $1.92, so that is
$2,085 per month, or $25,021 per year.

Since that's a rough estimate of $25k/year for one search term, I think
$100,000 per year is reasonable.

~~~
jwesley
Your assumptions on this are off. He may be making $100K per year, but
definitely not $25K for one search term. Google takes at least 40-50% of the
CPC as rev share. Also, the traffic estimator you used is broad match, meaning
it includes every query that somehow includes "personal development" such as
"Tony Robbins personal development" or "personal development workshop". Many
of these Steve will not rank for, even though he is number 1 for the exact
match.

I've run a site with similar content and good search rankings that gets around
50% of the traffic of Steve's site (according to Compete), and our AdSense
revenue was nowhere close to $100k per year. Even though Steve was using
AdSense more aggressively, it makes me wonder how he was able to earn so much.
The average earnings per click for us was only 15 cents or so.

~~~
imp
Thanks for pointing out my mistakes. I forgot about Google's share of the CPC.
Duh. I was also misreading Google's traffic estimator. That exact phrase,
"personal development" only receives 14,800 searches per month. Big
difference.

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noonespecial
I like Steve and have found some of his postings in the past quite
inspirational. I found a large part of me responding "you go Steve" while
reading this.

It wasn't quite enough, though, to silence the part of me that was responding
"you elitist prick" when reading things like _"Given the choice between having
an extra $100K per year of free money vs. becoming the kind of person who can
kill off that much income without fear or worry..."_.

Many people have lost their livelihood by losing a small portion of this
amount of "free money" and are facing dire economic circumstances in their
lives. This blog post may just be 6 months too late considering the current
world economic status.

Steve usually blogs "way out there" and I suppose that sometimes when you
reach hard, you miss the mark. I hope he keeps going, I just thought this one
was a miss.

~~~
arien
Yeah, I was kinda feeling the same way. I mean it's his blog and can do
whatever he wants about it, but things like this aren't too nice to read in
some circumstances.

~~~
noonespecial
The only thing I find more socially awkward than someone bragging to me about
how much money they are making is someone bragging to me about how much money
they _could_ be making and are choosing not to.

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josefresco
Keep the AdSense, donate the money to charity.

Asshat.

~~~
run4yourlives
Until you can safely scratch $100K from you income, you can't call people who
do asshats.

~~~
jrockway
It appears that he just did.

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nazgulnarsil
He doesn't give a strong reason for getting rid of the ads other than that
they aren't directly for products he endorses.

It's nice that he makes so much money that he can afford to have principles.
:P

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mhb
Interesting that he has a donation link on the sidebar.

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pchristensen
At one point about a year ago, he said he was making $40,000 a _month_ , so
he's still making tons. Plus, now he's got more real estate for higher paying
display or joint venture ads that he can sell directly because of the scale of
his traffic.

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Angostura
Summary: Turning to a wholey raw vegan diet appears to have affected my
cognition adversely.

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weegee
how about keeping adsense and give the entire amount to charity? sheesh.

~~~
weegee
amazing this comment gets voted down.

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debt
Complete moron.

