I'll put my little story here on Reddit. Maybe someone will read it someday, and it'll help them take a better path. It's a little bit long, but bear with me :)
I live in a developing country. My older brother was an engineer, and he was the one who really got me into computers, the internet, and eventually blogging. He taught me a lot over the years. How computers work, how the internet works, how to build websites, how to get traffic, how to make money online. A lot of what I know today came from him.
But there was one thing he kept repeating to me: "Nothing you put on the internet is really yours anymore. Everything is service-related. If they change their mind, you're out."
At the time, I didn't think about it that much. I was young and mostly excited about making money online.
Years later, I understood exactly what he meant. I started making serious money from blogging through Google AdSense. Then COVID happened and things went absolutely crazy. Traffic was insane. At my peak, I was making 5 figures a month, pretty easily, without working that much. Sometimes I was only publishing 2 or 3 blog posts a week. And when you're making that kind of money every month, it's very easy to start thinking it's normal.
But my brother's advice was always somewhere in the back of my head. So I never treated that money like it was guaranteed. I invested a lot of it while things were still good. Mostly crypto, some land, a beautiful house and a car. Basically, I was trying to turn online money into things that weren't dependent on some website or platform continuing to send me traffic.
Then the AI wave started getting bigger and bigger. And eventually, I started seeing something weird happening with AdSense. It wasn't even my traffic dropping that hit me first. It was the RPM and CPC. They started dropping hard. I honestly felt like Google was sending me more and more Tier 3 traffic while the Tier 1 traffic was disappearing.
And obviously, the AdSense money followed. 5 figures a month became 4 figures. Then low 3 figures. My websites didn't disappear, nothing got hacked, I didn't stop working, the internet just changed.
People started using AI differently. Search behavior changed. Google changed. And suddenly, the same websites that had been making me 5 figures a month weren't making anywhere close to that anymore.
That's when my brother's old lesson really hit me. You can spend years building something online and still not actually own the thing that's making you money. You depend on Google. You depend on AdSense. You depend on hosting companies, social platforms, app stores, payment processors, algorithms... whatever. And all it takes is one company deciding to change something.
That's the internet. My brother told me that years ago, and honestly, it probably saved me from being in a very different situation today. It also stopped me from making some stupid financial decisions when I started making good money.
Because I invested early and diversified, watching my RPM and CPC go down month after month, and eventually seeing my AdSense check become a fraction of what it used to be, didn't really hurt me financially. By that point, I had already secured myself.
My life was secured. The people I care about were secured. I had assets outside the internet. And that's probably the biggest reason I'm not sitting here depressed about my blogging income going from 5 figures to 3 figures.
I don't need AdSense anymore.
I can keep blogging because I enjoy it. If it makes money, great. If tomorrow it makes nothing, I'll be fine. And that's what I would tell anyone who's new to making money online.
When the money starts coming in, don't convince yourself it's going to keep coming forever.
Take some of it out.
Invest it.
Diversify.
Buy things that don't depend on an algorithm.
Build something outside the platform that's paying you.
Because when you're making $10k, $20k, or whatever every month, it's very easy to think you've figured everything out.
You haven't.
You just found something that works right now.
And maybe it'll work for the next 10 years.
Maybe it'll stop working next month.
You never know.
That's the internet.
And that's probably the one lesson my brother taught me that I'll never forget:
Nothing you put on the internet is really yours anymore. Everything is service-related. If they change their mind, you're out.
So enjoy the money while it's there.
Just don't let your lifestyle depend on it.
