I attended school with my main job being running Google Ads. $900 check every month. And then there was the money I made off supporting the open source app (which I wrote in Perl) that the website running the Google Ads was for. The site couldn't have been more than a few dozen pages.
Once upon a time, when there was no social media, but there were (blog)webrolls, Digg, Slashdot, etc. And there were quite a few personal websites. I had one and was happily showing off to my small group of friends while sipping “cutting-chai” in the suburbs of Bombay, strolling with a Girlfriend and taking Macromedia Flash exams on the spot to impress her. There was a Startup, Macromedia, that saw that I was pretty active writing ActionScript (ASFunctions mostly) to make Flash sing to my tunes. Bam, Macromedia sent tickets to fly to San Francisco, while another group invited me to speak at Detroit (it was then a nice city) I even got to meet the “father of ActionScript”, and that geeky guy that sometimes did the Apple Watch demos.
Early to mid 2000s, my website was blowing up and so came advertisers, and Google Adsense. I think, having a Google Pagerank of 7-8 helped a lot. Besides the typical, one of the best month I remember was when a company bought a bunch of Adobe’ Creative Suite licenses after clicking my affiliate link. Btw, I did away with any form of ads by around 2017/2018. I never wanted my website to be commercially earning money but in those days, the money on the side helped me bootstrap my Startups and pay my rent.
And some of these other pictures should give you a rough idea that my site was good enough to earn not-so-bad money early on. Also look at the sidebar in the website, that is how we added the ads - just plain text with hyperlinks.
Well, now, those images bring back a lot of memories.
I was in a similar boat. My early blog made money for me through affiliate sales for books about Flash, which eventually led to me writing books on Generator / Flash, which led to a job at Macromedia, which led to me reaching out and recognizing people in the community!
Dude, you are Mike Chambers. You are one of the person who made one of the biggest impact in my life and career. Your email that fateful day inviting me to be a "Macromedia Champion" (or something like that in 2002-ish) and the eventual "Lego" invite changed my life and career. It was the time I was in between jobs and was helping out everyone everywhere with Flash problems.
Man, you are making me cry. You made me sit and talk with the authors whose books I read to get a job, you made me have dinner with the people who made the software that I worked with.
I regret never getting a picture with you, and sorry for sleeping out on the Halo Game night at "W" that night. First jet-lag experience in my life and learning to adjust.
Edit: I think I'm mixing up the timelines but the gist of story remains. I do not have the email archives prior to 2006, and I lost all emails from brajeshwar.com, and the photos metadata are scrambled after a crash-recovery around 2006-2007.
Wow, both you guys were (a couple of) my heroes back in the Actionscript days. Thanks for all you did back then, because it gave my coding skills a heck of a boost in my early career.
Mid-2000s were a great time. AdSense and Yahoo! Ads were new. You had 18 year olds making $100,000/month practically overnight by throwing up a MySpace layout website (e.g., myspacesupport.com.)
