I watched a video on YouTube the other day that I felt especially compelled by. It got me to stop and think a bit more about my previous YouTube channels and to reconsider posting videos.
When I decided to close GameGirlsGallery (GGG), I also deleted my ASMR and Thrifting channels as well. They other two had fewer than a hundred subscribers, so it wasn’t any real loss.
After 18 months, GGG had well over a thousand subscribers and I regularly got comments and engagement on the content I posted. The decision to close the channel was difficult, but necessary. It was the same with removing that type of content from this website (Hard Choices: Removing Site Content).
Well, yesterday, I decided to go ahead and try again with YouTube. I’m terrible with following through on plans, but I will try to do a live stream every Wednesday and a recorded video once a week.
Ideally, I would like to be able to livestream with my phone, but you need 50 subscribers to do livestreams using the YouTube app. I thought about doing it in the office, but its so messy here, I’d be quite embarrassed.
I ordered an action camera off of eBay for 20 bucks and that should arrive sometime next week if holiday traffic doesn’t slow the parcel down. Its magnetic and has a lanyard and metal pad that can fit under clothes. That will allow me to film while I am out sourcing, but still keep my hands free.
I really wanted an Insta360 Go 3S, but its way out of my price range. My wallet can’t handle anything that fancy. Hopefully, the generic I bought will be able to manage my needs.
Other than videos related to eBay, I will likely include some slideshow videos of my domestic travel blog series.
I had a couple of Zoom meetings this morning at NC time (-4 UTC). So I woke up at 5:50 and logged in for those. They ran for just under 3 hours.
Afterwards I ate a light breakfast of granola and banana slices in yogurt. I added some hazelnut milk to balance it out.
Around eleven a friend of my mother’s, Julia, came and picked me up and we went downtown to Tommy Knockers for brunch with another friend of my mother, Ruby.
Scotch Egg at Tommy Knockers, PTCross section of scotch eggReceipt: $30.20 for eggs and drink
I had the Scotch Egg, a hard boiled egg wrapped in ground bacon and spices, topped with mustard and paprika. The eggs lay on a bed of garden greens quite stylishly.
To drink I ordered the tap cider, Alpenfire. I didn’t care for the cider, it was a bit like light beer. It didn’t have much body or depth of flavor. It was maybe like a semisweet apple juice.
Alpenfire Cider at Tommy Knockers, PT
It was a very nice opportunity to meet up with old family friends. Ruby’s son, Cedar, was my best friend growing up. I still consider him my best friend, that’s a position that could never be replaced.
Julia’s daughter, Nina, was another young friend. I can remember playing together with dolls and LEGOs. Her father raised stick insects and had games on his computer.
The Powerpuff Girls (1998)
I recall watching the premiere of Powerpuff Girls at Julia’s house. They had a special event running on Cartoon Network with some prize giveaway you had to call in for.
Fond memories. I got a chance to inquire about the other children I had interactions with. Kali lives in Tennessee, Cherese is in Florida, and Becky is in Oklahoma. Rebekah is still local and something of a sports prodigy.
Rebekah
After the meal we must have chatted for an hour and a half. All sorts of topics. Quite pleasant.
I was able to get a phone number of another friend’s sister, Lily, and I left her a voicemail inquiring about her brother, Lang. Hopefully we can meet before my flight home on Monday.
During the drive back to my father’s house we stopped at Laurel Groves, the cemetery, and I had a chance to pay my respects to my best friend, Cedar. He was just a year younger than I. It’s been 13 years since he passed. I wish I had kept in contact with him more.
There are many people I have lost contact with. I recall my first email was a Hotmail address. I lost the password sometime around going to Job Corps on February 5th, 2005.
At the center I had a Yahoo address and I was introduced to MySpace. I recall connecting with mostly students at the center and maybe someone from Port Townsend.
Sometime in 2006 the kids around me started talking about moving to Facebook. I remember logging in to MySpace and someone snorting and saying, “you still use that?”
I’ve always been regarded by others as being good with computers, but I’ve never been good with keeping up with trends. I expected Social Media to be a fad that would eventually go away.
Anyways, Facebook was quite effective. I was able to put in my schooling history and it brought up the profiles of several friends. That was quite impressive compared to MySpace.
I used the Yahoo email until I moved to NC. At some point the account became inundated with spam and I made an Outlook account. I initially try recovering my Hotmail, but I couldn’t quite remember how it was spelled, Aquila13 or something.
I still use the Outlook account these days. I tried getting back into the Yahoo, but it’s totally gone. I think Yahoo went away at some point. Been sold off or something. But the email address wasn’t recoverable.
So, unfortunately, I was never able to copy my contact lists over between any of the accounts. Additionally, I had multiple technology scares that led me to purging my social media accounts time and again over the years. Now I don’t use it at all.
Now with all the AI stuff going around I just don’t feel like I understand computers anymore. The last technology hurdle I successfully passed was Bitcoin. I chased the mining game from 2013-2020.
I should have just held with the HODL crowd. If you count all the Bitcoin and Litecoin I ever bought, I would have a multimillionaire by now. Thousands of coins to pay for GPUs and then ASIC mining rigs that were soon obsolete.
My last mistake was liquidating my last coins to cover the EIDL loans and other bills. I did it two months before Bitcoin hit $10k. I could have paid my debts and had plenty of cash left over.
TLDR: Disappointed with the operator. Stopped using it. Several undisclosed terms of service and billing issues.
Sometime back in July (2025), I watched a YouTube video about the Rocket AI tool. The service uses AI, and you interact with it to ask it to build either a website or a mobile app. The system utilizes tokens for all tasks, and it is free to sign up and begin building.
Planning
I got interested and started brainstorming a possible app I could make using Rocket. After I came up with a workable design, I made an account and started interacting with Rocket.
It was pretty slow, but I think there were just a lot of people using the platform. I had time to get up and grab coffee. I watched TV for a while.
During the first creation step, I was given a list of 6 possible pages to include in the app, based on the criteria I had supplied. I only had enough tokens to create 4 of the pages, so I decided to complete the last 2 during the next week.
Token Usage
You start with 2 million free tokens and are supposed to get another 1 million each week, but there is a cap on token usage of 1 million per week. You can probably see where this is going.
After my first week, the new tokens did not arrive, and I had to contact support on Discord. The support person couldn’t find my account, but the system refilled the tokens the next day.
I then managed to spend all 2 million tokens in the next session, which is odd because after rechecking the notification, it still said I had a limit of 1 million per week.
The following week, I still had a zero balance. The notification area of the screen looked different as well. The “1 million per week” text was gone. It simply said 0K/2M.
Problems
So just as I did before, I hopped onto the Discord channel to check the support thread.
I found another user asking about the missing tokens, and the support person had replied that the 1 million free tokens were only for the first 2 weeks. Just a free trial, essentially.
It never said that in the YouTube video I watched or on the signup pages. I also couldn’t find it in the Terms of Service or the Help documentation.
Community Issues
Another user had pointed out that after upgrading, their token count hadn’t properly increased from 1M to 6M. Support said that the 1 million “trial” tokens were replaced when upgrading to a paid plan. So instead of having 6M total tokens, the user was left with only 5M.
This term of service is also not mentioned in any of the documents or on the payment page itself.
Several users had issues with the service, including,
Recurring charges and billing
Incomplete tasks
AI insists it did something it didn’t
Token usage rates per task completed
Slow or no response to support emails
There are more issues, but I don’t have the patience to cover them all at this point.
Possibly part of the problem is that there only appears to be a single member of staff answering all the support requests. After reading through many of the help requests, I started to wonder whether or not the company was actually just one person.
Conclusion
Many AI-based services have become available since the technology has become easier to interact with. There is perhaps some danger in signing up for an unvetted service. Though these could simply be the growing pains of a startup.
For now, I have decided to stop using the platform. I won’t be continuing with my app project. If I find a similar service, I might try that out instead.
I got so busy with my eBay reselling that I forgot I had this series of posts I had said I would run. It is now partway through Q1 of 2025, so I have a little catching up.
Q3 – July, August, and September
Site traffic for these months was roughly the same as the previous period. But I did see an uptick in the number of ads displayed. I would attribute the increased ad views to the continued fine-tuning of ads on the more popular post topics.
As mentioned in the previous article, my goal is to reach $66 in annual earnings. This should cover the price I paid for the premium hosting plan featuring ad revenue.
Month
Ads Served
Avg CPM
Revenue
July
22,531
$0.23
$5.11
August
37,472
$0.24
$9.09
September
30,110
$0.20
$6.05
I’m not entirely certain why the revenues shot up for August. The increased traffic was nice, but it seemed to peak and then fall off the next month.
The only thing I can think of is that I had panicked and delisted around 20 posts after my other site was flagged for inappropriate content. Since the sites were closely linked to each other, I figured I needed to wipe out any references.
Goddess Era
That “flagging” had been in error due to a bad bot, and customer service was able to remove the suspension. They also clarified that the site was not in violation of any rules.
After I got the green light, I relisted all the taken-down posts. This caused a surge in traffic to the “new” posts. Both the Google and Bing web crawlers showed an uptick in analytical data during this period. Many of those old posts had been removed from the indexes because they were old and didn’t get much traffic.
Q4 – October, November, and December
The holiday season was quite busy for me, which was a bit odd. As an atheist, I don’t celebrate anything and rarely go in for the irreligious events either.
Of course, if you shove a turkey my way, I’m not gonna pass off the food.
Anyway, I was busy with my eBay sales in the 4th quarter. I did some good sales volume and was able to finish the year at a break-even on my Excel balance sheet.
Month
Ads Served
Avg CPM
Revenue
October
33,274
$0.15
$5.00
November
33,556
$0.20
$6.87
December
64,570
$0.11
$7.05
The site traffic seemed to hit a plateau in October and November, and I figured I had found my sweet spot between the wind and waves. I was a bit miffed at the lower CPM in Oct, as you can see it dropped to $0.15 and I lost $1.05 in revenue earnings compared with Sept.
November saw a return to better numbers despite no change in site traffic. I was starting to see a confluence of visitors on three posts in particular, though.
The Game of Vampires Wiki page I had created was getting some really good numbers and had been edging close to the top of my traffic list for several months.
I was still seeing steady traffic on the Game Guides for Puzzles and Chaos and some other high-value offers. I think it was around this time when some of the offers started going into the four-digit range and the Reddit folks were going nuts.
In December, I received around 7k more views than the previous months and 2,440 more visitors. The CPM went down drastically, but I did see an increase in my site revenue. I think many of the extra views were from repeat customers.
Top Traffic Sources
Sept’s top post was Puzzles and Chaos, for Oct it was the Game of Vampires Wiki, but come Nov, both were supplanted by the Top Girl Wiki. The game had gone through a couple of rebrands as the Alpha and Beta releases were cleared away.
I think writing a “Wiki” instead of a game guide made the difference.
Honestly, the Fandom-branded (Wikia) sites are all covered in terrible, unsafe advertisements. I can understand why someone would prefer to come to FWR instead.
There are many sites with guides, but few that claim to be a wiki, and that is what people are searching for when they look for guides. They type in “game wiki” or “game Reddit” to find info on whatever game they need help with.
The traffic to Top Girl Wiki tripled between November and December.
I also realized that the page I had thrown together was loading slowly on mobile devices and that the majority of my traffic was from cell phones. So, I added separate posts for a lot of the content, and I started using Pages instead of Posts.
This allowed me to set the wiki page as a Parent Page and the associated articles as Child Pages. The hierarchy makes for a more structured design format. Basically, it’s easier to navigate.
That will be all for this quarterly report on Wordads. I will try and remember to write another one in April 2025.
Earlier this year I made the decision to upgrade my WordPress account from a free to a paid plan. A big part of my decision was being able to monetize the site. I have tried my hand at affiliate marketing but have not had any success so far.
In the previous post, I detailed the costs of the upgrade and the discounts that I was able to apply to my purchase. My average cost per year is about 66 USD and so that has been my goal as far as revenues from the advertising on the site.
Divided by 9 (I started in March) it brings my monthly goal to 7.33 USD for ad revenue.
As you can see, my earnings have not yet reached that goal. April marked my first full month of advertising on the site. The FAQ page in the WordPress help files said that it would take up to 3 months for advertisers to fine-tune their presence on the site.
You can see there was a small drop in ads served after April, but this went up noticeably once June was finished.
Above you can see that I only published 3 posts for the period of June 17th through June 23rd. My visitor traffic was only 975 with total views of 1,720 pages.
The CPM was 0.26 USD which yielded revenues of 1.78 USD for that period. This was a large portion of the earnings for June.
I think the increased ads served came from completing the Daily Writing prompts.
These writing questions will often get a lot of traffic in the WordPress Reader and posts can garner Likes and Reblogs. On days when I complete a writing prompt, I will see my visitor traffic swell.
I still need 53.63 USD to break even this year on the cost of the upgrade. I am still hopeful that my site traffic will increase over time. My gaming guides continue to be the main source of site traffic.
I have tinkered with the idea of migrating over content from my other blog which gets more traffic, but I am concerned that it may not fall under the “family-friendly” guidelines for WordAds. This site received 15k views from April to June while the other site gets 17k+ each month.
Anyway, I will continue to track my progress and post another update for quarter three in October. Thanks for reading and have a great day!
As you have likely heard by now Adobe, the software company, is facing yet another scandal.
A simple search for “Adobe” on Google or YouTube will bring about a long list of negative articles and videos showcasing the many failures of this firm.
The FTC, an American regulatory organization, has charged Adobe with deceiving consumers about early termination fees and inhibited cancelation of services.
They are now saying that company executives hid those fees behind multiple layers in contracts, in small print, and charged as much as half a years worth of subscription charges as an early cancelation fee.
Soon Replaced?
AI is the new camera,
this headline was another recent blunder by Adobe staff.
It was such an unfortunate expression considering the vast majority of Adobe users are photographers and filmmakers whose livelihoods are being threatened by the rise of generative AI.
Changes in the terms of service for the software have suggested that Adobe intends to use the personal photos and other media that users have stored on their cloud accounts to train its new Firefly AI software.
This betrayal and theft of data has enlarged the outcry by customers and pundits of the industry.
Before that, in 2013, Adobe was hacked and at least 38 million creditcard numbers were released. It was found during the investigation that Adobe had used the same encryption password for all of the accounts.
Then there were the kickbacks to federal employees, 3 million (USD) to employees to get them to choose Adobe software for their computer systems.
The more recent scandals have shaken the confidence of common users of the software and has led to a mass drive to cancel and calls for a boycott.
Adobe stock is running strong.
Despite the online shame, Adobe’s stock price has not seen great losses and shareholders continue support the embattled company. Since it’s early IPO at 17 cents (USD) to today’s 533 dollars per share, investors remain confident.
It likely will not end with this action by the FTC. Consumer led lawsuits are on the way. Although those rarely lead to a beneficial return for affected users.
If you have suffered a loss or feel you have cheated or defrauded by Adobe your best bet in my opinion would be to send a demand letter.
You can find guides for demand letters on YouTube. Demand letters are often used to extract funds from nefarious robo-callers.
There are sure to be more scandals on the horizon unless the administration of the firm see’s a restructuring or a change of the guard.
As time will tell, bad actors make for bad leaders.
Do you use Adobe software? What do you think about this current scandal.
Do you plan on switching or sticking with Adobe? Drop me a comment.
I think we, as consumers, often complain publicly when we experience difficulties, but when things go as planned or better we rarely leave a good review. So, I wanted to take the time to say my piece.
My previous phone had been included in a family plan with CC and we were paying close to $80 for three people.
We would often receive texts about going over our data limits. This would cause the plan to automatically upgrade to the more expensive plans.
I currently just have a single line with Tello and I pay just $9 per month for unlimited talk/text and 1 GB of data, which is fine for my needs. I could upgrade to the unlimited data as well and the cost would only be $25 per month.
Since the previous service with CC was a family plan, the support staff were only willing to speak with the account owner. Whenever we had an issue we would have to call my relative in another state and have them call CC for support.
Supposedly, the account was set up for any of us to call, but when we did we always got the run around despite the numerous promises otherwise by support staff.
I am glad I decided to switch my carrier and my wallet is certainly happier too.
Thanks for reading. Questions or comments put them below, and have a great day.
Last month I decided to upgrade my WordPress plan to the premium Explorer plan with the intent to begin monetizing my site through ad placements using the WordAds service.
The Cost
I purchased my upgrade on March 16th. The final price tag of the plan was $222 for three years of service. When I went to make the upgrade there was a discount being offered for a full three-year registration.
The domain was free for the first year, included in all plans, and then $12 annually afterward.
I certainly wasn’t going to pass up such a good deal.
This brought my annual hosting cost down to $74. So this is the magic number that I will need to reach in advertising dollars to break even each year.
The Wait
I had some initial difficulties getting up and running with WordAds. After submitting an application for inclusion in the program I did not receive any responses other than a canned email.
After waiting four days (March 20), I returned to the application page. I was surprised to find a notice saying that my site was ineligible for WordAds. I contacted support right away.
I was a bit befuddled by the message, so I tried to get support using the Live Chat feature included in my upgrade.
Instead of a human, I was greeted by an AI.
I did eventually manage to get connected to a live representative, they call themselves “Happiness Engineers.” The conversation was quite long but I eventually was told that they could not tell me what the problem was and that someone would contact me.
I made sure to ask them about cancellation and a refund just in case I would not be able to utilize WordAds on my site.
The Problem
After 3 days of waiting I sent a follow-up email asking if they were close to finding an answer. I was worried because the 14-day time limit on cancellations was close approaching. All I got was silence.
After another six days (March 29), I received a response to my follow-up. A whole 13 days since I purchased the upgrade and applied for WordAds, and just 1 day left to be able to get a refund on the purchase.
The Answer
So it seems the bot that crawls the pages had made a mistake and flagged my site as not being family-friendly. The Happiness Engineer directed me to reapply to the program with a supplied link.
Following their advice, I returned to the application page and tried to reapply. But I got a different error message this time.
I returned to the email exchange with support staff and requested further assistance. The staff member eventually had to manually add me into the program.
The Conclusion
On March 29th, I was finally accepted into the WordAds program.
For March I had three days (29, 30, and 31) of advertising on my site before the ledger rolled over to April.
I have read that it usually takes around three months to get a clear idea of the revenues a site will generate as the advertisers get a feel for your site’s content and the types of visitors who frequent it.
I can see a direct correlation between the days where I have high traffic and the greater CPM levels. This is still the early testing phase but I did see some $0.50 and higher CPM levels on the more busy days.
I now need to refocus my energies on producing quality content and guides to further drive the growth of this site.
The next quarterly posting of my WordAds experience should be sometime in June.
If you have any questions about my experience that I did not cover here then please leave me a comment below.
Fat Wallet Refugee 