Forum Moderators: martinibuster
The other day I was surprised that a friend of mine was not only getting Adsense income for quite a while, but he has been in the UPS club for 12 months. He said the site started as a hobby and so he never really told anyone, then it became wildly successful and then he didn't want anyone to know in case they copied it etc.
Now his 9-5 job is less than 25% of total income and he is thinking of becoming fully reliant on Adsense, which only takes up a few hours a week. He likes his job, but wouldn't be too upset about giving it up to live off Adsense.
Ok, it is a nice dilemma to be in, but he asked me for advice and I thought the best course of action was to find someone who had already done it. So has anyone given up their day-jobs for Adsense? If so, how is it working out?
Would the site benefit from having another 40 hours per week (plus travelling time saved, plus the extra you put in because that's what self-employed people do) - invested in it?
That's a very good point.
Also, if the guy likes his job, maybe he doesn't really want to change career paths. (A doctor, lawyer, or lounge singer might have a great year with mutual funds, but that doesn't mean he should give up his career to become a full-time investor.)
Are you guys telling me I shouldn't continue to expect an increase in pay with AdSense?Some are reminding you that no tree grows to the sky.
So as everyone is saying here -- be sure not to put all eggs in one basket. And enjoy it while it lasts.
Now his 9-5 job is less than 25% of total income and he is thinking of becoming fully reliant on Adsense, which only takes up a few hours a week. He likes his job, but wouldn't be too upset about giving it up to live off Adsense.
So, he's making what, 2500/3k-ish from his regular job? I'd quit that sucker in a heartbeat. I don't know where you live, but you can get that kind of pay anywhere around here. It'd be one thing if he had an awesome high paying job that he'd worked his way up the corporate ladder for the last 10 years to land...
BTW, if he has a high traffic, long established site, he could always add independent advertisers and affiliate income to supplement Adsense and probably make more than that 3k just from that. If he's worried about depending wholy on one source of income, that is.
Some are reminding you that no tree grows to the sky.
So you build a forest.
TJ
Are you guys telling me I shouldn't continue to expect an increase in pay with AdSense?
We're simply telling you that there are no guarantees, and change can occur at any moment.
Consider the recent AdWords changes regarding direct-to-merchant affiliate ads. Google's clampdown on such ads occurred with very little notice, and it forced many affiliates to switch business models overnight.
Also consider what happened when Google introduced "smart pricing" for content-network ads about 10 months ago. Many if not most AdSense publishers saw their revenues drop, and some watched their earnings fall by 80% or 90%.
If you want to have a career as a Web publisher or entrepreneur, you need a business model that goes beyond "I'm making hay while the sun shines."
So you build a forest.
Trillianjedi wins best one liner of the thread
If this guy is really serious about working for himself, then he should quit, work at least 40 hours on his site, and spend another 20 on new ideas... other revenue streams.
As a previous poster said if his can get a similar job in 2-3 months in the same city he lives then i would say after saving a 6 month emergency fund he should quit and take a calculated risk!.
I agree. As long as he has an emergency fund, could reasonably expect to find a similar job within 6 months, and has a source of health insurance, from a pure numbers standpoint he is most likely losing a lot of money in "opportunity cost" by not working on his web site full time.
(1) organize his life so he could cover his costs despite ups and downs in his income, then
(2) go for it.
If something changes and he has to find a job again, so be it. He's proven that he's employable; going back to a j*b can be his Plan B.
My grandmother was in her eighties when she told me that looking back on her life, she invariably had more regret for things she left undone or untried than for things she tried that didn't work out well. Go for it.
If this guy is really serious about working for himself
"He likes his job, but wouldn't be too upset about giving it up to live off Adsense" doesn't make it sound like this guy has reached the point of being really serious. Before making such a decision, he needs to think about what he wants to be doing a year, five years, or ten years from now.
I mean who can take more than a week or two off a YEAR with a dayjob? How can you get really that involved in a project because you only have weekends off and weekends are the time you normally use to run all those errands you can't get done during the week because you're at work? I get sick just thinking about being a part of that cycle again.
Anyway, due to my free time after dumping the 9-5 a few years ago I have come up with several creative projects on the side I otherwise wouldn't have started. Working for yourself, for me, is about quality of life, not just money. Obviously, you have to take reasonable financial precautions, but how much or how do you quantify personal freedom and quality of life? The intangibles are priceless.
Only because of my free time am I able to join the tsunami reconstruction effort as noted in my profile. I'm really not trying to drop my site on here but it was a perfect example, IMHO, of an intangible aspect you wouldn't have the opportunity of trying if you were held back by a day job.
Isn't savings in the US at an all time low?
It is not. This is a misconception the media loves to repeat. The “savings rate” often quoted doesn’t include the billions saved by American’s in their 401(k) retirement accounts, Health Savings Accounts or Section 125 benefit plans. Doesn’t factor in the value of pension plans, Social Security benefits or the increase in value of ones home and other real estate and investments.
Back on topic, I’m pretty impressed with the many constructive and thoughtful post so far. I only have one observation to make. Is your friend a risk taker or not? If s/he is not willing to take some risk, then stick with the day job. If on the other hand s/he is comfortable taking on a new challenge, the perfect time to do so is when they have an income source that will support them during the transition. e.g., AdSense income.
After they make the change, spend the next six month working to on diversifying income and web traffic sources so they reduce their exposure to AdSense. Remember that they are not quitting their job, but starting a new job in which they are the boss.
Personally, this is a “no brainier.” I would have quit yesterday.
I think that two months cash savings is fine, since you will most likely live more frugally for awhile anyway...
My point is, if you are happy now with the way things are... no need to change them. I think I would drive myself crazy if I had no day job and all I did was read this posts all day and spend a few hours doing *real* work... ;-)
Thanks for the answers.
In the discussion I had with my friend we talked about many of these issues above that's why I wanted to see if anyone has actually done it. Some things we weren't sure about were stress, insecurity and the social consequences of not having the regular contact you get in a work environment. Plus he knows if he quits his job, it will be difficult to get one like it again.
BTW here are some points to clarify: about 25% of total income doesn't equal $2500-3000 per month. It is more at least $3300 (x+3x=4x), but I don't know the exact numbers either.
As for being a 'Made for adsense site', I think that was an unfounded accusation. His site was popular but he could not get much more than $0.25-0.50 true effective CPM before Adsense. By 'true' eCPM, I mean dollars for every 1000 page impressions, not ad impressions. By the time you look at unsold inventory and the advertiser network cut, what seems like $1-2cpm, can really mean far less in the end. Needless to say, by replacing crappy ads for free cursors with targetted Adsense ads, his site went off like a rocket with good CTR and CPC.
As for being a 'Made for adsense site', I think that was an unfounded accusation.
It wasn't an accusation, so whether it was unfounded or not is moot. :-)
Then there were the free trappers who bought their own stuff, trapped their on their own where they wanted, when then wanted. And they did as they pleased. They didn't have the security. But they were free.
It depends on what you want.
I had it hosted on a shared hosting solution and not surprisingly they soon asked me to leave for eating all the bandwidth and cpu cycles. I set about moving it to a dedicated server, which of course ended up costing me a couple of hundred dollars per month.
For a few months I had paid these hosting fees out of my own pocket, until a friend pointed me towards Adsense. I stuck up the ad code on my site, hoping to recoup some of my costs. I can still remember the day when I checked my balance in Adsense and probably will for a long time to come. Not only did it cover the costs of my hosting but it also outdid my salary by quite a large margin.
The success of it lead me to ask the same questions that everyone seems to be asking in this thread. Should I just dump the day job and concentrate on more sites? It actually led me to start a thread here a while back called 'Betting it all on Adsense', which seemed to attract quite a lot of interest at the time.
I have now had the Adsense code on my site for about a year and I've seen my revenue roller coaster all over the place. I now fully realise that there is no way that I can expect a guaranteed income from Adsense. The revenue seems to adhere to a set of rules I don't fully understand yet. I've also seen a dip in the amount of visitors to the site thanks to changes in the market that my site is aimed at. Taking all of this in to consideration, I would be mad to quit. Right? With so many factors that affect the revenue being out of my control it would be craziness to even consider it.
However, since starting Adsense, I have been putting nearly all the cash in to a savings account. I'm nearly at the point where I have the equivalent of a full year's salary stashed away. I have made a New Year's resolution to go out on my own this year. I'm at the point in my life that if I don't do this now then I probably never will. I'm not much of a risk taker either. My biggest financial risk to date is taking out a variable rate mortgage, rather than a fixed rate mortgage :-)
But I love putting together and running web sites. If I could turn this in to a 9-5 job that I happened to do from home and got paid the same salary (or even less) then I would choose it any day of the week. I work in an IT consultancy firm as a developer and as anyone else in IT will tell you, my job isn't guaranteed for more than about three months in to the future anyway.
So, what's my plan?
Well, once I have a year's salary in the bank I plan to hand in my notice to my current employer. Before that happens I'm going to sort a few things out first. I'm going to talk to my local government office that deals with people starting up their own business. I think every major city has one of these departments and talking to them is usually highly recommended. They can offer you free advice on finances, law, tax etc. In some cases, if they see your venture as one that could potentially grow and result in more jobs then you may also receive some financial backing.
I'm also going to put more effort in to getting at least one or two more sites up and running. Will they be made for Adsense sites? Nope, not at all. They are sites that I have wanted to setup for a while now but haven't had the time to. I'm going to have to make some sacrifices in my life to get the time to set these up and get them running but if it means that a couple of months down the line I'll be working for myself on something I thoroughly enjoy then it's a sacrifice I'm glad to make.
I will be giving each site the same effort and love that I've given all of my other sites. I'm not going to just make these sites so I can put Adsense code on them - I'm going to make them because I love doing it and the fact that Adsense might make me enough to live on is just a major bonus. For all I know they may only make a very small percentage of the revenue that my current site does.
I also intend to look more in to alternatives to Adsense, or even advertising that will compliment it. Talking to the companies that are advertised on my site directly would be one obvious path to choose. I'm also going to look in to affiliate based advertising. Before I take the plunge I am planning to at least investigate and trial some of these alternative methods.
I have already considered some of the worst case scenarios that could happen when I do this. The most likely one is that 3-6 months down the line I find that I'm not making anywhere near enough to support myself. That gives me 6 months to find myself another job. I've a number of years experience in IT, so while I may not be able to get a job at the same level I have today, I should be able to get one that at least allows me to keep eating. Sure, there are even worse scenarios that could happen but if you go around thinking the worst all the time then you will not get much enjoyment out of life.
I'm going to go for it! I have an opportunity to reduce the amount of time I need to be working and get more enjoyment out of life. Sure, there are risks involved but I'm going to do my best to minimize them or at least reduce the impact if everything goes pear shaped. I don't want to look back in years to come and realise I have missed an opportunity to realise a goal I have had for years.
Sorry for waffling on for so long. This topic has been dominating my thoughts for quite a while now :-)
Some things we weren't sure about were stress, insecurity and the social consequences of not having the regular contact you get in a work environment. Plus he knows if he quits his job, it will be difficult to get one like it again.
As you can see in the above quote, money is not the sole motivating factor for the person. While many here think that it is a no-brainer to quit the job and maximize the part bringing in the most revenue source (e.g. web business), the person is considering other things as well. Some are simply more risk-averse than others. They may be losing tremendous opportunity costs by sticking with their jobs, but it's their lifestyle choice.
Sounds like there'll soon be one more of "us"! It'll have its up's and down's - but there's nothing like it. Go for it!
If you do this, you must write a blog about your experiences, so that the rest of us can live vicariously through you! ;-)
Good luck! Think I'll need about two more years to get enough savings, but I hope to join you someday!
