It can always be worse. I quit Illumination for reasons I will not go into here or anywhere.

My earnings and followers immediately plunged. I expected that, but still, that’s an owwie.

As to Adsense, there was a time when my own site earned $1,000 a month from Brer Google. These past few years it dropped to about $20 a month. It was not worth the trouble. I sold the domain to someone else.

Amazon? Oh, yeah, big money. I have some ancient books I wrote there. Every quarter or so they send me a dollar or so.

Then there is HubPages. I still have around 45 articles there. That used to get me $50 a month or so. That’s gone down by 50%. Why? Because they run ads and nobody will pay much for ads any more.

I think a lot of the old advice just isn’t true any more. I don’t know what the new advice should be, but I’m pretty sure the old ways will not work now.