The first ad network that ever paid me was UGO. I had wrestling news websites with a real, returning audience, and UGO put ads on them. Every visitor who came to read the news was now worth something to someone else.
I did not fully understand that at first. I understood it when the check arrived.
How Ads Paid on the Early Web
The model was simple once you saw it. Advertisers wanted to reach people. Ad networks collected space on websites and sold it to those advertisers. Site owners like me supplied the people.
I was paid on what my readers did: visits, clicks and time on site. More visitors meant more ads seen. More clicks meant more paid actions. Readers who stayed longer saw more pages and more ads. Every one of those numbers was tied to whether my content was any good, so the business and the writing were the same job.
That is what my first company, Emblaze, was built on. It was an advertising business. I worked with multiple ad networks and had high-traffic sites under me, and the money came from that traffic.
UGO, Then DoubleClick, Then AdSense
UGO was first. DoubleClick came after, and it was one of the big names in online advertising at the time. Later, Google AdSense became a big one for me.
AdSense launched in 2003, and it changed who could earn from advertising. Before it, you generally needed enough traffic for a network to want you. AdSense let almost any publisher put relevant ads on their pages and get paid for them. By then I had been earning from ads for years, but I watched it open the same door I had walked through to a lot more people.
Working with more than one network also meant I could compare them. The same readers could be worth different amounts depending on who was selling the space and to whom. That taught me my audience was mine to place, and that the network was a partner I could choose and change.
Each network worked a little differently, and each one taught me something about what advertisers valued. The constant was the audience. The networks changed. The readers were the asset.
The First Check
My first check was around $20,000.
It changed how I thought. I realized I could make more money than my school principal, the person who ran the place I spent every weekday. And the money had come from websites I had built myself.
It raised a question I could not shake: I did not know why I was going to school. I am not telling that to make a point about school. I am telling it because it was the first time I understood that the skills I was building on my own had real value, and that nobody had to hand them to me.
The way I put it to myself then is the way I still put it: I had the power to self-learn and earn. Everything I knew about building sites and getting traffic, I had taught myself. The check was proof that teaching yourself counts. It was also proof that the skills a classroom was not teaching me, such as building pages, finding readers and keeping them, were the ones someone would pay for.
What That Check Still Teaches Me
The first lesson was about value. Money follows attention that someone else wants to reach. If you build an audience, you have built something an advertiser, a partner or a buyer can put a number on.
The second was about learning. School was one way to learn. It was not the only way, and for the work I wanted to do, it was not the fastest.
The third was about measurement. Getting paid on visits, clicks and time on site trained me to watch what people actually do, not what I hoped they would do. I still read numbers that way.
In 2013 I brought the Emblaze name back for Emblaze One, an agency for web development, e-commerce and digital marketing. The work was bigger, but it started with that first check. If you want the fuller story of how the wrestling sites began, it is in how I started making money online as a teenager.
