A couple of "route finder" reviews posts on an old personal blog of mine suddenly did well on Google and, as was the trend, I had Adsense on my site. Just from those few posts, I earned between $2000-$5000 most months of that year (with one stray month just shy of $10000) and did little "real" work that year. In 2009, Google penalized the blog because I got greedy and started running "text link ads" on the front page (dumb idea). Traffic crashed and the income stream disappeared.

I eventually got the penalty lifted but by then a lot of people had figured out that ranking highly for the names of the top route finders was a goldmine and now my posts are on page 2 rather than in the top 5 results and make rather little.

Interesting while it lasted but the work I'm doing now to produce an income feels more rewarding than checking Adsense 20 times a day ;-)