There are many ways to optimize your earnings.

There are many blacklists available you can use download and input into Adsense so that low paying bulk advertisements do not show. Here is one, Google for more: (http://www.adsblacklist.com/)

You can also create channels, for certain categories and track your earnings by channel and then inspect the ads in low paying channels and look for some obvious ones to filter out.

You should use section targeting to tell Google which content sections to emphasize for relevance: (https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&#...)

To increase your click through rate you can place your ads in a better position, follow the heatmap:

(https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=...)

There are many other variables that come into play, something known as smart pricing can lead to huge swings in ECPC / CPM.

Those assessments of charisma are pretty generally agreed upon.

This time it looks like Obama, but I can't say for sure because I never watch TV. I've only seen about 20 seconds of him, in a clip on YouTube.

Hilary Clinton reminds me a lot of Nixon II. She has that same forced smile of someone who's naturally a behind the scenes operator, but who realizes you have to seem friendly to get elected.

This was way, way before the Funded came out. And while it would be nice to add my two cents in, (a) the VCs themselves never actually did anything unethical, they just used the EIR as a proxy, so they can always shrug it off like, "It wasn't OUR fault - we had a "rogue" EIR who did things his own way ... and (b) I've had enough years of ruminating and one day decided to put the past behind me lest I become a bitter old man in my late 20s/Early 30s.

This article just struck a nerve and I wanted to add my 2 cents ...

That's why I get miffed whenever I hear talk of "ideas are nothing, it's all in the execution" because I couldn't help but think that those two EIRs weren't executing jack-sh@# before I told them the idea and HOW to execute better than anybody else could, what to do when you had duplicators, etc.

Never mind me, I'm just a rampbling, bitter old man in a young man's body ...

No. I realized TV was what I would now call a "time sink" (didn't have a word for it then) when I was about 15, and stopped watching it. I've never owned a TV. I do sometimes watch old TV episodes on DVD though. I especially recommend Fawlty Towers, Jeeves and Wooster, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and The Saint.

I can't begin to express how true this article is. I was once a naive, yet optimistic 24 year old who spilled his guts to a reasonably prominent EIR at what was then a top-flight VC firm in the area. I started suspecting something was wrong when I would get invited to their super-fancy digs (receptionist had 3 20-inch IBM flatscreen back when a 20-inch flatscreen actually almost cost $20k, the board room had 30 Aeron chairs, etc.), yet curiously enough never while anybody else was there, and would always be grilled for my 2 years of research findings, but after they "sucked out all my ideas" I couldn't seem to get any call-backs.

Tried another startup a year later and got sued by the EIR who claimed at first that our ideas were very similar ... then so similar that in fact he thought I "stole" what he saw as "his" idea.

I couldn't believe the nerve, and yet there they were, grown men twice my age who made million screwing me over without a second thought about all the crap they pay lip service to on their websites (ie, "Our reputations mean everything to us" and "Our honesty is the basis of our credibility") and all sorts of other mumbo jumo.

IN CONCLUSION: By all means keep at it, but be very, very careful - if they screw up they're still VC partners or EIRs, but you're done for at least that idea.

We started about a year ago and launched about 3 months ago. The biggest two problems are:

Time. Neither of us can afford to quit our "jobs at a big company". We're not 20 and have mortgages, school payments, etc. Working part-time is probably 10 times less effective. Ohh... I cannot stress it enough! Part-time can be as bad as 50 times less effective; sometimes weeks can pass with no work being done, depends on how busy we get at our day jobs.

Marketing&Advertising. We cannot afford a solid PR campaign and expensive ads. We got some independent evaluations with ad quotes as high as $500K/year. Google brings a steady (albeit very small) stream of daily new users, but unless we come up with something, it will take forever to reach good numbers. Common advise like "blogging" BS and "sign all your emails with your URL" do not apply and really make no sense - you can't get into 6-figure user numbers this way.

http://pikluk.com

Willpower's got nothing to do with it.

That's like saying, "What? You never strike your children? You must have a lot of willpower."

Here's what to do. Put you TV in front of your house with a sign on it, "Do Not Take".

7 minutes later, problem solved.

there's an element of truth to this (freedom to use good tools, for example).

i've followed both models, but one of the best things you get from outside investors is forced accountability; it's a good kick in the ass to regularly take hard looks at your plan and have to meet deadlines and ship stuff.

if you're bootstrapping or part time, it's easy to kind of fart along and spend years on an idea that would have either succeeded or failed quickly if you had been forced to execute to a plan.

We recently launched a service that might enhance those earnings a bit. It's tipjoy.com, a micropayment tipping system. Users tip stuff they love online.

Smaller sites will benefit disproportionately, because their fan base is probably more dedicated. So the "tip through rates" should be better. We'll see soon.

Alternatively, getting more targeted ads should help. If you know what your users like to see, it can be great. As Ads increase in relevance they approach content.

I believe the best part is you can't be fired and when people tell you that you can't do it, you do it anyway.

I don't know what it is with people thinking they have a right to control my web experience. From people demanding they be able to show you advertisements (or else you're 'stealing') to this chap demanding that he get to show you his 404. A "right" to control what I see as a result of a status code? It's mind boggling. What my application choses to do with the status codes your server return is my business, not yours.