I’ve been with Google Adsense for about 15 years. I started with Youtube, where I had one of my paintball videos get over 14,000 views, and a few others got over 1,000. Then I started IC2S on Blogger and, at one point, my Ang Lee Hulk review somehow ended up as one of the top Google image results for the movie. Sure, I’ve always been a very small fish in a big sea and I am well aware of that. However, I just want to mention this because, in this entire time, my grand total payout from Google Adsense has been…

$101.50.

Right now, there’s $44 in my Adsense account. It has been there all year. Oh, sure, Google tells me that I’ll make a couple dollars per month, but it never actually increases my balance, and I’ve even seen it drop over time for inscrutable reasons.

Meanwhile, in an attempt to see if I could monetize IC2S in order to cover some of the costs of running the site, I’ve had to grit my teeth as Google plastered the entire site with ads, making it fucking ugly and pretty much unreadable. I’m certain that this has negatively affected site traffic, because who the fuck would want to read a site where every paragraph is broken up with huge ads? And all this, in a desperate hope that maybe Google will grant me a $100 pittance sometime this decade?

Nah, fuck that.

As of today, I’ve shut off Adsense for IC2S. Now you can actually enjoy my writing and see it the way it was meant to be seen. I hope that this allows more people to come to enjoy IC2S. I still fondly remember how formative blogs like Head Injury Theater, 11points, and others were for me growing up, and I hope that I can provide that kind of reach for other generations.

All that said… IC2S is a lot of work. I don’t post nearly as often as I used to, just due to the time commitment being untenable with fatherly duties, other hobbies, my mercurial writing burnout, etc. When I do write, it tends to be Retrospective or a Love/Hate series, which can monopolize a month or more of my time, easily, each time I set about writing them. On top of this, it costs me about $90/year to keep the site operating. I can afford this, at least for now, but it sure as hell would be nice to get an acknowledgement that I’m not just pissing my money away and screaming into the void endlessly.

All this to say: I’ve set up a tip jar. If you enjoyed something you read on IC2S and want to show some thanks, the option is there to provide a bit of monetary compensation. This is entirely optional. I’m not holding the site ransom, stopping my writing, or shutting the site down anytime soon (there are too many Resident Evil properties left to do that). I’ll add a little reminder about the tip jar at the end of each post, but that’s a hell of a lot better than getting face-blasted with ads every ten seconds with the old setup.

Anyway, that’s it for this little announcement. I’ve been on a short break from the Resident Evil Love/Hate series, but I’m starting to get the itch to dive back in, so hopefully we can get the final batch of games done and posted in the next few months. Until then, I hope to see you back here soon.