Stranger things have happened, but not often.
After eight and a half years, I have actually earned real money from this blog. A few days ago Google paid me out just over £60 (the minimum) for the ads that have been displayed here since the beginning. For comparison, the hosting costs of this blog has been around £300 over the same time period, so financially this is a bad deal.
Another way to look at this is that there have been 333 posts here, so that is £0.18 per post - not a good salary, as most of them have taken a couple of hours. There have been a total of 216,000 visits since establishment, corresponding to £0.28 CPM, which is actually not too bad. So the problem is (relatively) few people read my posts.
As an update on my last state of the blog post, this blog is down to around 1500 visits per month. Which is a base earning of about £0.05/month, plus more from the occasional ad click. So the mathematically astute among you may work out that based on the previous post and the earnings rates I list above, it should still be many months before the £60 threshold was reached. Well done, you are right! However, I recently started a YouTube channel (and associated blog): A Gamedev Plays. There the CPM is closer to £0.70, plus clicks, and I’ve had a couple of clicks. Clearly, this is where ad-based content publishing is heading. The money from this is what pushed me over the edge.