Now that the worst has subsided, I’ll tell you all a little story. This year, in getting prepared for my last Formal at Trent, I went to grab a beer out of the fridge, but couldn’t remember how long it had been in there (I had left it at Trina’s house some time ago – likely October…. it was now March). I looked at the bottling date, but couldn’t remember what Owen had described as the breakdown of the bottling code. Then I thought, what if there was a site I could punch in the bottling code, and it would tell me if the beer was skunky or not. Now, any idiot can drink a stale bottle of beer trying to rationalize that "it’s beer man.. just drink it"; but do you not notice the difference in taste? A cold refreshing bottle of Blue deserves a little more respect than to ‘just drink it’. So, i told some people there, that I should build this website that checks the bottling code, and tells you if you can drink the beer.
Months later, I have accomplished that very thing – www.beerbuddy.ca (now with Google AdSense) and a limited selection of beers. I built the site in a about a day, and then spent weeks trying to decide on a domain name that was available. I really wanted to get a .com, but most of the good ones were taken – so i stuck with beerbuddy.ca.
The results of my experiment with AdSense also surprised me. I signed up for AdSense on Thursday… they said it would take 2 days or so to verify my site and account. Two to three days later, I received notice that my account had been activated. I dumped some code onto the site, and I was displaying ads right away – mind you the ads were PSAs until Google could index my site – which happen a few hours later. Now I was serving real ads, targetted to the text on my page. I then thought about how to get some traffic started to my site. Associating beer with the type of person who might visit CollegeHumor.com, or read Maxxim, Stuff, or FHM, I decided to submit a link to all of those sites, and then I went to bed.
I was pretty busy last week, so I didn’t really think much about the site until late Wednesday night, when I decided to see if my webstats showed anything more than the 21 or so people that had visited previously. I typed in the URL…. "501 Bandwidth Exceeded?" What the? Something must be broken on the server.. I login to the reseller interface to see that 1GB of traffic had been consumed in little more than a day. I boosted the bandwidth on the account to 3GB, and went back to the site.. looks fine. I checked the stats again… 23,597 unique visitors!?! Something’s gotta be wrong…that has to be the whole server’s stats, I thought.. Scrolling down the page to the referers, I was amazed. CollegeHumour had posted my link, and I was in disbelief. My next instinct was to check my AdSense ads…. 6 clicks? i thought after logging into AdSense…thats only like $1.63. And then I looked a more into the report… $1.63 was only for today.. I clicked "All time".. $51.73?! with 267 clicks on Tuesday causing a whopping $50.35 USD to be amassed in a single day. Wow.
So, if you haven’t already checked out BeerBuddy, please do so, and let me know what beers I should add next, or what I can improve, I’d love some feedback on the site – drop it in the comments of this post. And, if you haven’t already tried placing some AdSense ads on your site, give it a shot; previosuly, I thought nobody ever clicked those ads, much like my banner ads on Script-Source.com years ago (I think i accumulated $50 in 1.5 years!.. and then the company tanked and I never got my money).