ExNotes Review: Site Advertising

In the good old days of paper magazines a writer could break even or make a little money from a story. That money was paid upon publication. Those days are mostly gone. There are only a few motorcycle magazines left. For a reader, that’s a good thing: Only the best writers are still being published in a condensed, paper format. There is no need to buy a dozen magazines as all your favorite authors are paddling in one of three lifeboats: Rider, Roadrunner or Motorcycle Classics. For the rest of us the modern Internet format requires a scramble for revenue. It’s a battle of pennies, clicks and views.

The ExhaustNotes.us website is truly a labor of love. It began when Joe Berk and I found ourselves at loose ends. Berk retired from his job of promoting CSC Motorcycles and I was dumped (along with everyone else) from Motorcyclist magazine when they re-styled the magazine in a futile attempt to save the sinking publication. Berk still has his gig at Motorcycle Classics but the man writes zillions of words a day. He needed another outlet for his creative juices. I had given up writing and was standing around watching concrete cure. I tried to get on at Motorcycle.com and had a few stories published there, but budgets are tight in the Internet motorcycle content business. From this journalistic crossroads the ExhaustNotes.us website was born.

If you factor in our time, ExhaustNotes.us doesn’t really pay. Berk handles all the mechanics of the site and we have a web guy that does some magic behind the scenes stuff. Then there’s a cost to host the website. On the plus side, the site earns money from the advertisers and gets a fraction of a penny when you purchase an item from Amazon links in our stories. We don’t do a lot of Amazon linking as it’s such a small amount of revenue it’s hardly worth the bother.

The big bucks come from the Google ads you see sprinkled around ExhaustNotes.us stories. We have no control over these ads. Google places them according to some algorithm that uses words in the story to determine what type of ad is shown. For example, one of Berk’s gun stories will cause gun ads to appear. Jeep stories will attract Jeep ads. If I do a story on the Yamaha RD350, Asian foot-fetish ads or penis-enlargement ads will pop up. Come to think of it, maybe that’s only on my screen view. We even had to delete an ExhaustNotes.us give-away story because Google flooded the story with fake contest-entry forms. We didn’t want readers to be scammed.

This is where you, the reader, comes in. ExhaustNotes.us gets paid from Google each time you click on one of their ads. You don’t have to buy anything like Amazon links. Usually the revenue from Google ads varies from $1 to $10 on a good day. That’s not a lot but over a month it could add up, you know? Anyway, Berk has a pretty good idea of how much money comes in and ExhaustNotes.us would like you all to participate in a money-grabbing experiment.

Here’s the deal: After you read an ExhaustNotes.us story, click on the ads that are inserted in the story or above the story. It doesn’t have to be a current story; one from the archives works just as well. Each time you click on a Google ad we get a fraction of a penny or 35 Dodge coins, whichever is more. Share the ExhaustNotes.us story to your social media. You never know when something will go viral and ExhaustNotes.us will earn $25 in a single day. The more people that view a story mean more clicks and more ad revenue.

As I edit this story it sounds like I am complaining about the writing business. That’s not the impression I want to leave you with. I’m fine with not making money from writing but being fine with it is not the same as accepting it. I’m looking for a steady revenue stream, man. Berk says we have written over 1000 stories on ExhaustNotes.us and that’s a lot of writing. Even if Berk did 80% of it that’s still 200 more stories than I would have written if ExhaustNotes.us didn’t exist. When Berk first started ExhaustNotes.us I asked him why we should go through all the hassle. Berk told me:  Writers gotta write.  And so we do.

Keep on clicking those Google ads, my brothers.

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