I ran out of space in my head...the net seemed vast enough so I decided to lump it all here.

Saturday, May 02, 2009

Who's Been Watching?

Five years ago, when I signed up for Blogger, I saw a tiny little blurb inviting me to sign up for Gmail.  I knew it was a new free email account, but OH MY, I sure didn't know how big it was. 

At that time, 1G mean A LOT of free space.  The biggest storage medium we had were CDs and what we called a Zip Disk (RIP), which had a whopping capacity of 750MB.  So when we heard that a company was giving away 1G of FREE space, we all went nuts. 

Suddenly, everyone wanted a gmail account.  The only problem was, Google suddenly closed the free sign-up and made it strictly invite only.  Which meant, the precious few (thousands?) who signed up suddenly found themselves with a hot new commodity: Gmail invites.

People were selling them on eBay, leveraging them for dates, and up at the gmail-swap forum, traded them for all sorts of things.  Magic tricks, friendship, books, letters...Most popular offerings came from soldiers in Iraq, who needed the extra space so they could send pictures to their families.  They offered pictures of the desert, momentos of Bagdhad, and other little things, such as you name scribbled in sand or a picture of a tank with a big, green bottle with your name on it.  But most popular of which were the offers of LETTERS.   That if you agreed to swap an account, you could get your own, certified, American soldier as a penpal.  

Someone should call Google, because I bet a few marriages resulted over those transactions. 

One could say that I used my horde of ten invites wisely.  Made a couple of bucks on ebay, had my name stamped somewhere in Baghdad, or even my own military penpal (although that would not have settled well the boyfriend, even if I wouldn't meet him until two years later)

I wish I could have called myself the nifty early adaptor, but no. I decided to be pretty magnanimous with my stash and shared it with friends.  When I got down to two, I decided to hold one to one, and swap the other.  And what did I get?

I got...A card trick. 

Yep, one of the hottest commodities at that time, and I bartered it for a stupid card trick.  And not a good one, either. 

I wish I could have said that I was an early adaptor, instead of a naive dolt who signed up for things.  I settled for "semi-early adaptor", and vowed not to repeat that mistake again. 

Until a few months ago, when I realized that before I took a hiatus from blogging, I signed this account up for AdSense. 

Imagine the irony when I started earning a few extra bucks out of SEO a few years later.  

We all know that the first people who managed to figure out AdSense made a killing. I was, sadly, not one of them.  I would have, if I had the time.  Instead, I fell in love (and you're more than a few thousand dollars sweetie! Because I know you still google me!)

Even when I found out I had signed up for AdSense, I kind of...ran out of things to say.  But I was happy that I managed earn 49c--the result of 2 years worth of rants.  So I decided that this way way too much work, and just went on my way. 

So imagine my surprise when, after the Google keyword tool, I decided to check out my AdSense account and found a jump to $4.00.

Now, four dollars might be chump change, but it get's a little suspicious when $3 came from earnings made in February.  Just February, and not a single penny since.   Again, $3?  Chump change.  But $3 also translates to a couple hundred page views. 

And considering that I haven't updated this blog for months, and has since dropped from the Google stratosphere...Who has been reading?

Sad that I haven't integrated any tools to track if this was a single visit from one person, or there's been a spike for a single keyword.  Perhaps someone who thought my 24-year self's rant on Valentines Day funny...I can only hope.