I woke up this morning, grabbed my morning coffee and was sitting down to let the caffeine wake up my sleeping brain neurons when my dad told me he had accidentally opened an envelope meant for me and passed me the mail. I thought it was just another bank statement when I noticed the distinctive green cheque like printing on the back.
My sleepy brain neurons started to reactivate gradually without the aid of the hot steaming cup of java. I looked at the figure and was immediately jolted awake. Jesus Christ, Buddha and (cannot say the other deity in Malaysia)!
Yahweh eh, er…I mean wahlau eh, I didn’t know I had Google AdSense running!
Well, I did for a while back in the good old days of sixthseal.com before a group of “concerned bloggers” launched a concerted campaign of hell raising in Mountain View, CA for allegedly “endorsing” a drug site. I think they were just jealous coz my traffic back then was very high and I got a cheque just after 14 days of putting AdSense on. 😉
Anyway, I took the ads down from sixthseal.com and…put it elsewhere. Little did that group of bloggers know that the sixthseal.com empire was like The Roman Empire back then. All roads leads to sixthseal.com and all that. 😉 Okay, let limpeh tell you a story from the good old days of blogging:
Well, back in early 2003, when most of you weren’t born yet, if you think of a Malaysian blog, you think sixthseal.com. It’s the brand recognition factor (like Nescafe, Panadol etc) – it was really popular back then and sixthseal.com was on a very aggressive conquest, er…I mean expansion program. I had a forum, a website for helping people write assignments, a dedicated drug blog (the now defunct castitas.com) and many other development projects.
I didn’t even know how many sites I had! Honestly, I had so many domains that I couldn’t keep track of the various development projects I was involved in. I helped a couple of bloggers start up their careers and was one of the PPS core founding members. I had other sites which were “cleaner” than sixthseal.com and thus more acceptable for AdSense. sixthseal.com was always meant to be my outlet of expression.
Thus, I put the AdSense code into my other websites and it did what it does best (making money). However, just like the Roman Empire, the rise and fall of civilizations is a constant in every single endeavor. My readership declined in direct correlation with my escalating drug use and my posts were getting more and more erratic (not in frequency, I always post at least once a day, but in content – it was more and more about drugs).
Thus, the Persians invaded, the Mongols took over, etc etc and fast forward to a year later, I was sent to drug rehab and sixthseal.com was completely taken down (since I can’t renew my hosting from rehab, with them not having Internet access and all). However, the other sites remained online and was actually making money for me while I was in rehab.
My mom told me that there were several other cheques like this that came in during my time in rehab but they threw it away coz it was only about USD 100 or USD 200. WTF! Their justification is that our bank charges for foreign cheques makes it quite useless anyway, but oi, RM 300 or 600 is still quite a lot of money okay?
This cheque had much more and I am still trying to identify which one of my sites is generating this kind of income. Back to the Roman Empire analogy, I will only offer this quote from The Sopranos:
Jewish guy: You ever heard of the Masada? For two years, 900 Jews held their own against 15,000 Roman soldiers. They chose death before enslavement. The Romans? Where are they now? (spits)
Tony Soprano: You’re looking at them, asshole.
I was so excited by this unexpected windfall that I accidentally wore my trainers to work instead of my dress shoes. 😉
