Ad Revenue Isn't Coming Yet — Here's How I'm Actually Making Money
Ad Revenue Isn't Coming Yet — So Here's How I'm Actually Making Money From Fikrago
If you've read the last several articles on this blog, you already know the ad revenue story isn't a good one right now. Rejected by Raptive. Rejected by Mediavine. Flagged by AdSense. Ezoic still ahead, and no guarantee it goes any differently until the traffic quality problem underneath all of it actually gets fixed. On paper, that could read like a site that isn't making anything.
That's not actually true, and I think it's worth saying plainly, because the ad rejection story can make it sound like the whole project is stuck. It isn't. I make money selling digital products and running ads — real ads, the kind I control directly, not the kind sitting inside someone else's approval pipeline — and that combination has quietly been the actual engine underneath Fikrago this whole time, while the display-ad approval process drags on in the background.
What "Running Ads" Actually Means Here
When people hear "running ads" in the context of a blog that just got rejected by three ad networks, the natural assumption is confusion — wait, I thought you got rejected. And I did, from the networks that place ads on your site automatically and pay you a share of the revenue those ads generate. That's a completely different thing from the affiliate links and product placements I run myself, directly, on pages like my tools page — links to products I've personally selected, earning a commission when someone buys through them, with no network approval required at all.
That distinction matters more than it might seem. Display-ad networks are gatekept — they decide whether your traffic and content meet their bar, and until they say yes, that revenue stream simply doesn't exist. Affiliate links and direct product commissions aren't gatekept the same way. I don't need Mediavine's approval to put a product recommendation on a page and earn a commission when someone clicks through and buys it. That part of the monetization puzzle has been working, quietly, the entire time the display-ad side has been stuck in rejection after rejection.
The Digital Products Side
The other half of the actual income picture is direct sales — the digital products I've built and sell through Gumroad. The prompt vault, the ebooks, the templates. These don't depend on any ad network's opinion of my traffic quality either. Someone finds a product, decides it's worth the price, and buys it. That transaction doesn't care whether my GA4 dashboard is full of bot sessions from Singapore. It cares whether the product itself delivers value to the person who bought it.
This is actually the part of the business that's most directly protected from the traffic quality problem I've been dealing with everywhere else. A display ad network needs volume and engagement across your whole site to make its math work. A digital product sale needs exactly one real, motivated person who wants what you're selling. Even with traffic quality issues dragging down the ad-approval side, a smaller number of genuinely interested visitors is enough to keep product sales moving.
Why This Matters More Than It Might Seem
There's a version of this story where the ad network rejections would have been genuinely devastating — if display-ad revenue were the entire monetization strategy, three rejections in a row would mean the project simply wasn't making money, full stop. That's not the situation I'm actually in, and understanding why has changed how urgently I think about the ad-network approval process.
Display-ad approval isn't the thing standing between Fikrago and being a real, income-generating project. It's an additional revenue stream layered on top of one that's already functioning, even if modestly. That reframing matters, because it means I can work on fixing traffic quality at a reasonable pace, methodically, article by article, without the financial pressure of feeling like nothing is coming in until Ezoic finally says yes. Something is already coming in. It's just coming in through a different door than the one I originally assumed would be the main one.
The Honest Limitation of This Approach
I don't want to oversell this either. Affiliate commissions and digital product sales, at the volume I'm currently running them, aren't replacing what a fully approved, high-traffic site with all three ad networks running could theoretically generate. Display-ad revenue scales with pageviews in a way that direct sales don't — more real visitors generally means more ad impressions means more revenue, fairly linearly, once you're actually approved. Digital product sales scale differently, tied more to conversion rate and audience trust than raw traffic volume.
So the honest picture is this: right now, the real income is coming from a smaller number of genuinely interested people finding value in a product or a recommended tool, not from a large audience generating passive ad revenue. That's a real business, just a different shape than the one I originally pictured when I started applying to ad networks in the first place.
What This Means Going Forward
This is part of why the standing rule across every article on this blog now is a clear call-to-action pointing toward a service, a product, or a direct way to reach me — not just internal links stacked up for SEO's sake. If the real, working revenue is coming from direct sales and affiliate commissions rather than display ads, then every article should be doing double duty: telling an honest story, and giving a reader an actual, obvious next step if something in that story resonated with them.
It also changes how I think about the traffic quality fix that's been the throughline across most of these recent articles. Fixing that isn't just about finally getting approved by Ezoic. It's about growing the audience that's already responsible for the revenue that's actually coming in — because more real, engaged readers means more people discovering the tools page, the product page, the services page, regardless of whether a display ad ever shows up next to the article they read to get there.
Ad revenue isn't here yet. That's true, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise after three rejections in a row. But the site isn't sitting empty-handed while it waits. I make money selling digital products and running ads I control directly, and that's been quietly true the entire time the bigger, more visible rejections were happening in the background.
Written by Ayoub Zinani, Founder of Fikrago
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Image Prompt: A simple flat-lay of a laptop showing a small sales notification alongside a notebook with product sketches, warm encouraging lighting, modest but genuine success mood, no text overlays, no logos.
(Reminder: add descriptive alt text to this image when uploading to Blogger — e.g. "Tracking real product sales and affiliate income while waiting on ad network approval.")