Google Ad as an alternate funding model - End of month follow-up

Now that one month has passed since I put up Google Adsense on my blog, I can report on the performance of such advertisement.

I last wrote about this on 20th September, 2004 and reported that I have about 1017 impressions and generated US$0.68.

However, in the last 10 days of the month, the situation has changed quite significantly. Firstly, I made two announcements in two educational lists and the number of impressions jumped. In the whole month, I have 2464 impressions. That is in the last 10 days, I have more impressions than the 20 days before that. In terms of income, thanks to a few high value click through (e.g. on 21st September, there was one click through which worths US$2.16 - throwing the dismal US$0.68 in the last 20 days into round off), the overall monthly income has risen to US$8.40 with a click through rate of 0.7%. [Deleted: I should not have disclosed the click through and other statistics in the Adsense program. 16 Oct, 2004. Just need to point out that these statistics were all incorrect - based on too short a time frame. The current running statistics is different!] [Thanks, Gautam Ghosh for pointing this out in the comment. Unfortunately, Halscan comment was not emailed to me (because I have not upgraded to a upgraded account) nor these the comment counter reflected that I have commented posted.)]

On average, I put in about 1 hour a day on this blog. However, as writing helped me to sharpen my thoughts, I suppose I should not attribute all my time to the cost of writing this blog. Assuming that it represented 15 hours over the whole month, that would put my hourly rate to US$0.56 per hour - much below any minimum wage for any work in any developed country. Blogging as a way of making a living is not viable to me!

But I will still continue to keep this blog going. What drives me? Good question! I suppose the answer to this question will be interesting to those researchers on motivation of the contributors within the open source community! For me, I don't know yet... may be I can ask Roni to design a role play to help me sort this out. :-)