It took some time but my app is finally live in the playstore.
One of the most annoying processes ever. That testing period is actually so hard to deal with. (And weirdly random, because the last time I applied I didn't even had 12 testers...)
After 4 tries I finally got this mail today. What a relief 😀
Don't get why you need to go trough so much test cycles. Litterly didn't change or update a thing because everything worked. It's just a painful process...
Since I was 12 and got my first phone, I've always used Samsung. Never had any issues, until this year.
For the last 4 years, I'd been renting a Samsung. I upgraded a couple of times to a new model and never had any issues, until I decided to stop renting. My contract ended, I sent the phone back, and a month later I received an email saying I needed to pay a €450 fine for damage.
I sent the phone back undamaged. I took pictures right before packing it up in a phone box with bubble wrap.
When I tried contacting them, they sent some very unclear pictures. I told them I'd sent the phone undamaged and had pictures to prove it, taken right before sending it. They never even bothered to respond to my last email and didn't ask for the pictures.
I then contacted Samsung directly, and they said they'd look into it. After not hearing back, I followed up again, only for them to respond that the case was closed and they wouldn't do anything about it.
That was enough to make me never return to them.
(Tried posting this on the Samsung Reddit, mods removed it)
Hey everyone. I wanted to share my honest experience after 2 years of running my website, so you know what you're getting into when you start a blog or site of your own.
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It all started with a frustration. I was planning a road trip and needed dozens of different websites just to find basic info. So I figured, why not build one site where you can find info about every country?
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I began with Webflow, a no-code website builder, and used it for about a year. In the best periods I was getting maybe 1 to 5 visitors a day. Then I rented my own server, rebuilt the whole site in actual code, and within a few weeks I was getting 20 to 50 clicks a day.
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Today I'm sitting at 300 to 500 visitors a day. AdSense, honestly, is a dead horse. On a good day it makes me 10 to 20 cents. Maybe it's the travel niche, maybe it's just a bad time for display ads, but it's not worth much.
Affiliate income is a different story. Over the past 6 months I've averaged around €60 a month, and it keeps growing every month. That's the part that keeps me motivated.
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I'm still improving the site every single day. So my advice: don't give up early. It takes time to learn and adapt to how the internet works right now, but if you genuinely put in the effort, you'll get there.
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Happy to answer questions if anyone's curious about anything.
So a couple years ago I went on a road trip through Europe and when I was planning it I needed like 50 different websites to find everything I needed. Driving rules, visas, food, you name it. That annoyed me enough to just build my own site.
Two years later I've got guides for every country, some city guides, vaccine info, solo woman safety, all free to use. Pretty happy with how it's grown.
But here's the idea I just had. I want to make this the Wikipedia of travel, and honestly I can't be accurate about every single country. So what if I had ambassadors? People from a country, or who know it really well, who want to help make the guide as good as possible. You'd be able to write and edit your country's page, create new city guides, all with your name on it.
The site has affiliate partners like Booking, Trip, Expedia, Viator and more, so ambassadors would get access to those and a share of the affiliate revenue too.
I literally just came up with this so I still need to figure out how to set it all up properly, but I wanted to throw it out there and see if anyone would actually be interested. Feel free to comment or DM me!
I've been wondering whether it's worth the effort to place AdSense ads manually in the code versus just letting Google handle it automatically.
A few things I'm curious about:
Would love to hear from people who've tested both, especially on content-heavy sites. What's your experience?
Made a 4 day campaign on Facebook, just checked my Google analytics report on paid visits. ALL visits coming from Facebook paid ads had an engagment of 0 seconds.
Do they just sent bots?
I've been building a free travel guide site for the past two years covering 190+ countries. The site has built up a decent amount of authority and traffic over that time. Recently I added a blogger hub where travel writers can apply to get their own page on the site for free.
The idea behind it is pretty simple: a lot of people want to travel blog but don't have the technical knowledge to set up a site, can't afford hosting, or just don't want to start from zero with domain authority and SEO. Instead of going through all of that, they can write on an established platform that already has the infrastructure in place, affiliate partnerships set up with major travel brands, and two years of authority behind it.
Writers keep a big part of their page earns through the affiliate links. No code, no setting up your own affiliate accounts, no having to figure out WordPress.
I'm genuinely curious what people here think of the model. Is this something you'd find useful as a writer? Is there anything about the setup that would put you off or that I should think about differently?
Not sharing the link since I know that's not allowed here, but happy to talk through the idea.
Been running Travel Payouts on my site for about a year now, then added Stay22 to the mix two weeks ago.
Today I got my first Stay22 booking notification. Saw "total commission: $234" and completely froze. Is that what I earned, or just the total cost of the booking they're showing me for context? Spent way too long second-guessing it before finally reaching out to support.
Confirmed: that's my cut.
Two weeks in and already a $234 commission. Safe to say Stay22 is off to a strong start on my site.
Has anyone else had a good (or bad) experience with Stay22 vs Travel Payouts? Curious how others are finding the two side by side.
I run a travel guide website called Atlas Guide (atlas-guide.com) and I've been on AdSense for a while now.
I'm getting a decent amount of organic traffic mostly from Google Search Bing and Yandex, but I feel like my RPM and overall ad performance could be better. I'm wondering if it's a traffic quality issue rather than a placement issue.
A few things I'm curious about:
- Does niche matter a lot for traffic quality? Travel feels competitive but also broad
- Any signs I should look for to tell if my traffic is low quality vs just low volume?
- Is there anything on the site side (page speed, content depth, bounce rate) that AdSense actually picks up on and adjusts your RPM for?
I've been working on a travel guide website for almost 2 years now. Currently doing +-1000 visitors a day. Over 400 pages in 13 languages.
Currently I get like around 3000 affiliate clicks a month that earn me more than AdSense. From those 1000 views a day Google shows +-70 ads with a rpm of 70 cents.
Is that normal for the travel niche?
Revolut is switching from Dragonpass to LoungeKey.
Is this an improvement?
Is there any place where you can find a sort of excel file with all cards ever released?
Where you can sort on class and stuff.