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Railmaps
@railmaps.com.au

I started the Australian Rail Maps website in 1996, and it's been online for 30 years since then. I opened a Google Adsense account in 2004 and have displayed Google Ads for the 22 years since then. But today, I stopped using Google Adsense, and railmaps.com.au is now free from advertising. 1/10

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Railmaps
@railmaps.com.au

Over the years, ad revenue grew beyond all my expectations, way beyond just funding web hosting. In fact, I earned more than enough to live on. The effect of Covid on travel put a major dent in things, but, just as we were recovering from that, something much worse happened 2/10

Railmaps
@railmaps.com.au

In 2021 and 2022 as life returned to normal post-covid, after an initial bounce closely mirroring public transport post-covid trends, railmaps web search traffic and Adsense revenue both declined steadily. It took me a while to twig to what was happening. Too long probably. 3/10

Railmaps
@railmaps.com.au

My revenue was highly dependent on one major corporation, and like any single point of failure, that is risky. Google’s dominance of web search delivered 95% of web my traffic pre-covid. And Google Adsense was the source of 85% of my revenue - in some months, up to 96%. 4/10

Railmaps
@railmaps.com.au

AI summaries at the head of Google search results have decimated web traffic to railmaps.com.au Traffic from Google search is now down by 95% compared to pre-covid. Traffic from other search engines is unchanged, but they're so minor in comparison as to be more or less insignificant. 5/10