After 20 years, a blogger says he turned off Google AdSense for his sites

What changed

Veteran blogger Eric Goldman says he has deleted all of his ericgoldman.org domains from Google AdSense after running the program since 2005. It has been reported that he joined AdSense early to learn the business and earn a little money; early clicks allegedly paid as much as $20 each, though his peak annual take was roughly $1,000 and more recently around $100 a year. The move closes a two-decade-long experiment with ad-supported publishing.

Why he pulled the plug

Goldman cites several reasons. He says AdSense now makes de minimis revenue for him, increasingly enforces content rules that he can trigger inadvertently (he references Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem), and — crucially — has started showing ad formats he didn’t want. It has been reported that despite configuring AdSense to a single modest ad slot, the service began inserting an extra banner (bottom on desktop, top on mobile), pushing intrusive ads onto pages. Readers complained; his adblocker hid many of the changes from him, but the complaints kept coming.

Legal and practical calculus

There’s also a legal angle. Goldman argues that removing ads helps clarify his blog’s non‑commercial status under tests that increase liability for commercial actors. At the scale he’s earning, he says the tiny income wasn’t worth the added risk or the constant monitoring required to police ad behavior. Sound sensible? For small publishers juggling content and compliance, it probably does.

End of an era — and a request

It’s a bittersweet parting. Twenty years is a long vendor relationship to unwind. Goldman asks readers to flag any stray AdSense impressions they spot so he can investigate. For the wider web, his exit is a small but telling reminder: the economics and ergonomics of ad tech have shifted, and not always in publishers’ favor.

Sources: ericgoldman.org, Hacker News