The night
23 January 2016 was the Bigg Boss 9 finale. The blog I had registered for ₹111 had 6,335 people reading it at the same moment. I filmed the Google Analytics screen on my phone and posted it on Facebook: “Finally made it.”
The $23 lesson
A few weeks earlier, with more than 2,000 people on the site, I had opened AdSense expecting a fortune. It said $23.
My friend Pranay Anumula asked me about page speed, click-through rate and where my ads sat. I switched to a light, clean theme and moved the ads around. I went from $10–15 a day to more than $300 a day.
The shortcut
Some people told me to add clickjacking scripts. They would have made more money. I had hoped for $100 and I was already past $2,000, so I said no.
What it paid for
I expected $100. The blog made more than $2,000, and the first AdSense payment, about ₹96,000, paid my final-year engineering fees.
