I Tried Using Ads

This week in Braytech, we'll touch on what's been happening with Braytech and its developer for the past few weeks:

• report on AdSense test

• bills and money

• depression and executive dysfunction

• new features

AdSense test

A situation so dire, I gave in to trying ads. Here are some points summarising what I've learnt from this sucky experience:

• 75% of Braytech users employ some sort of ad blocking

• for March 4 to April 4, estimated earnings are $32.78 AUD

• anecdotally, AdSense isn't lucrative for gaming-related websites

In summary, this wasn't worth trying and isn't worth keeping. It now makes a lot of sense to me as to why other websites, plaster the page with 3 or more ad placements. Our values in regard to user experience, design, and product quality, are not aligned and have slightly different goals and trajectories. Money, the answer is money.

There's a lot of integrity and legal processes involved with a product like AdSense, including verifying my postal address. The post from Google still hasn't arrived so at this point I can't even claim this money.

Bills and money

I've struggled to make Braytech grow for the past 2 years but the value in working on it every day was aligned well with the contributions made by less than 0.001% of its users. These contributions were consistent until recently and have since halved which is troubling as I made commitments and must continue to honour them. This is an allegory for "I'm screwed."

I will continue to increase the value of Braytech in any way I can but am actively exploring alternatives through other realms. The street corner.

Depression and executive dysfunction

This was covered by the previous section. The start of the month is "pay day" and it's increasingly hard to see what I've built up slip away because of the game's performance paired with Braytech's visibility in the community. It's been so difficult to start on tasks including writing this informational piece. Most users will never read this but just as I said years ago on Patreon, I continue to feel a need to remain transparent and honest with the generous few who do help to literally sustain my existence through their contributions.

New features

I've completed some work which saw me rewrite some code and rearrange some systems. This work enables new features but due to the previous section, I've had trouble sticking it through and working through the bugs. I'm not yet confident enough that I can deliver them so I won't mention them by name at this time.

For the technically inclined, here's some dot points of what I've been doing:

• collecting more data than ever by adding metrics (stat trackers) to my profile data scraper

  • I've started by collecting some numbers on fishing which means I can do fishing leaderboards!

• isolated and rewrote components for generating share images, with the benefit of typescript

  • it's my first monorepo!

  • it's been difficult to setup but I have managed to reduce some code duplication in the process

  • the code for metadata has type safety and feels so much more reassuring to work with

  • instead of drawing to a canvas, I now write JSX as with Braytech proper to create share images with–it's so much faster to iterate and doesn't crush my creativity

  • it's faster than ever and caches itself!

Made it this far?

Thanks for reading and I hope you gain something from my sharing.