September 13, 2026 – The ExhaustNotes Blog

By Joe Gresh

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 two lifeboats: 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. Maybe reach deep and hit that Donate button below, my brothers.

By Mike Huber

Having a battle buddy in Colombia was great. Not just for company but for safety. Matt and I had met while backpacking through Asia and kept in touch as we both traveled throughout the world. In January, we coincidentally found ourselves being neighbors in Medellin, Colombia.

For almost three months we would hang out a few times every week. Usually just getting some beers and people watching around our neighborhood. There is never a shortage of sights to see in this city (see my previous blog and the photos here). At the end of each night, we would always text to let the other know we made it home safe without missing a kidney or being kidnapped. The tradition of checking in with each other continued even when my travels brought me to my next destination, Ecuador.

Matt informed me a few Sundays ago he had a date and would catch up via text after the date. I never received a text that night. OK, I thought he probably fell asleep as he starts work quite early on weekdays. He is a lead project manager for a communications company in the United States. One of the things Matt and I clicked on is he has been working remotely for 5 years, and during that time he traveled most of the planet while his company thought he was based in Seattle. Of course, from my previous life working remotely and doing the same, I totally dug his perspective on that.

As Monday came and went still with no word from him, I decided to reach out to one of our mutual friends who was also in Medellin. She returned my text quickly. She had found him unconscious in his apartment Monday morning. He was in pretty bad shape. She managed to have a doctor come to the apartment and administer an IV and look him over. Outside waiting for the drug to work, there wasn’t too much that could be done.

It took four days before Matt was able to walk without falling, and his speech was still slurred by the time I was able to speak with him on Thursday. His laptop, phone, and credit cards had all been stolen. What’s worse, they got him to unlock all his bank accounts and those were drained.

Being a solo traveler myself I had to find a way to help him. Fortunately, they had left his passport. With no phone there was no way to PayPal him money, but with his passport I would be able to Western Union him some cash to at least give him some reprieve financially as he slowly began to untangle the mess. This was a mess that that would continue to spiral in ways neither of us could even imagine.