3 ms·

curious: did you recently monetize your blog? i just got an ad, i’m pretty sure that hasn’t happened before.

• xena 4y ago
  I started monetizing it for Hacker News readers because I got tired of the hateful venom in the comments section. I figured if people are going to get angry at me, I might as well get paid for it. The ads have made enough that it's a tax problem, but overall I do make enough off of them to fund ridiculous ventures like uploading my entire stream VODs to my CDN: https://xeiaso.net/vods https://xeiaso.net/vods. The ads really do make up for the costs involved in serving things over my CDN (AVIF images being widely supported and my video compression experiments https://xeiaso.net/blog/video-compression https://xeiaso.net/blog/video-compression help). It's not enough to make me quit my dayjob (I would probably not want to do that anyways), but it's enough that the passive income pays for all my video games: https://xeiaso.net/blog/blog-profit-2022 https://xeiaso.net/blog/blog-profit-2022. So, yes. There's ads. Blame other Hacker News users being toxic for why they exist. Maybe we can have a better world where people are just nice to other people, but until then I put ads on the blog so that my side projects are more sustainable.
  • j3s 4y ago
    > I figured if people are going to get angry at me, I might as well get paid for it. omg i know right, every time a post of mine winds up on the hn frontpage for a second the comments are all like "actually you're wrong and this thing you worked so hard on is very stupid, please delete this now, also please feel bad, thank you for absolutely nothing" it reminds me of playing magic the gathering in 2008 - the 14 year olds at the shop (of which i was one) would always talk this way (arrogant & mean) about each others decks. having a confident contrarian opinion is fun. and everyone loves an underdog. but it's extreme here :/