Precisely four years after I first put Google Adsense ads on my games website darnkitty.com, Google have finally given me some money! You can see it on my bank statement here.

For those of you who don’t know what it is, you can put ads on your webpages (see my website here, and also little ads that appear at the bottom of some posts on this blog), and if people that visit your site click them, you get a few cents. You don’t even have to choose the ads, Google does it for you.

However they won’t pay you until you reach 100 US Dollars. Since my website started off very small and without very much useful content, I figured I would never get there. Indeed, I started off by getting less than $1 per month (see the graph below. Note that the points on this graph are EARNINGS PER MONTH, not total earnings.

EARNINGS PER MONTH FROM ADSENSE

Early this year (2009), we had a talk at our workplace from the creator of Java, and it inspired me to getting back into Java development. I wrote a couple of games in Java and put them on the website, and in the process put in a bit more colour to the site and jazzed it up a bit. Since then, my earnings increased a lot! In Nov 09, the month just gone, my website got me $25 US. Sure, not massive amounts of money, but I’m happy about it!

I’m not sure what caused the big spike in November 2008, I think my website got a mention somewhere on a major internet forum, but if you discard that month it seems that my website has got steadily more and more popular this year. If only it made about 10x times as much as it does, then I could work on it full time from home and never have to go into the office again!

It just goes to show, put some effort into your site and you might just make some money from it. You probably won’t get megabucks like you see in those online ads (“I made $5,000 a day from Google Adsense!”) but it’s a nice little hobby.