If you want to know about my journey from starting a blog from scratch, growing it from zero, and leaving it because of Google, read till the end.
I started the blog in April 2021 with a fresh domain name. I wrote one blog post daily about top Korean dramas and movies. I also started posting content on social media. I shared reels on Instagram and Facebook, as well as trailers on YouTube.
After a few days, I applied for an Adsense account and got approved in one go. There were no policy violations. But earnings? A few cents. Because the traffic was very low. Still, I didn’t lose hope and kept writing because consistency is the key to blogging.
It was July 2021; the traffic started to increase, and I saw my first dollar in my Adsense account. From now on, I was earning an average of $7-8 per day and receiving around 1000 views per day.
The period between August 2021 and August 2022 was a boom. On average, I received around 150,000–200,000 page views per month and made $300 per month. I was happy because this is my first successful blog.
The traffic was all organic because many of my posts ranked on the first page and in the top positions. About 70% of the traffic came from only 3–4 posts. I was ranking for all the top dramas and movies query on Google.
During this period, I monetized my blog with other ad networks such as Adsterra, Ad.plus, and Valueimpression and received a few paid post opportunities. I’ve attached all of the earnings screenshots below.
For a short period, I tried Ezoic and made $100. It is the worst ad network and slows down your website. I also earned around $200 through guest posts.
Total Revenue:
2964+1543+731+407+100+200 = $5945
Now comes Google’s core update. It was around September or October 2022 when my blog was hit by the core update (spam or HCU), and traffic decreased drastically. To recover from this drop, I started optimizing my existing posts and creating new posts with more SEO.
Before the core update, I was receiving around 4000-5000 daily users, which reduced to around 2000 after the update and fluctuated a lot. It is evident that if the traffic decreases, the earnings also decrease. My revenue was hit by this drop and reduced to around $100 per month.
Then came the September 2023 helpful content update. I hate that update. It hit my blog and reduced the traffic to less than 500 per day. If this was not enough, the November 2023 core update killed my blog. The traffic was reduced to less than 100 per day.
This was not just my blog. My competitors in the same niche (Korean dramas) were also hit by the update. They also lost a lot of traffic. Some of them are dead now.
But why has this happened? Me and my competitors were ranking for searches related to top dramas and movies. After the September HCU update, our search engine positions were taken by the big media websites.
Movieweb, Screenrant, Pinkvilla, Filmflare, Lifestyle Asia, IMDB, etc.
And how can you forget Reddit and Quora? The March 2024 core update shot a hundred bullets at my blog and killed it. The only page that was getting views also vanished from the search.
As you can see in the screenshot above, the blog is now dead. Though Bing is sending some traffic (around 140 clicks per day), it is not worth a dollar now. I have stopped writing posts on it.
I have written a total of 300 blog posts till now, covering top lists, quizzes, polls, products (amazon affiliate), travel tips, etc. It was a content-rich blog.
Lesson learnt – Don’t rely on Google.
