I must confess to losing a bit of mojo a few months ago, when it comes to posting here. Why? If you had been visiting this blog, I’m sure you would have noticed that I had Adsense ads on my sidebars. I know some blogging purists would argue against heavily monetizing a blog, but in my defense I added that extra income stream to help me out too to cover my domain and hosting bills.

While I think I am really generous when it comes to giving out freebies and having other people use it, I am also aware that maintaining a website like this also costs money. Of course, I don’t have bottomless pits of money (I wish!) so I opted to add some ads for a bit of revenue.

Then my world crashed down (at least this little blog’s world hahaha!) when I got an email from the big G saying that this site does not qualify to run their ads coz of yaddah yaddah yaddah and also I feature copyrighted content. That hit me in the gut to be honest coz for one, I work/slave for the freebies I post here. It’s no joke to produce freebie stuff and to be called as someone hosting copyrighted content just disheartened me a lot.

But a day or two after, I realized, they are WRONG! So I should stop being morose about it. Freebies I made are mine and not copyrighted by others. And if I ever use any resource (fonts, base patterns, vectors etc) I make sure they are free to use, and I take extra care to check if they allow personal and commercial use and their terms and tag my freebies accordingly. I am also adamant about linking to whatever web resource were used to produce my free items. And I have NEVER EVER posted a work done by others as is, that I did not heavily modify on my own. I sometimes use resources (I’m sure graphic artists would know this) like textures or fonts from other artists as background, embellishment and always with credit. And in any case, like 90% of my freebies here are made from scratch by me and took me hours, sometimes days to make.

So why was I flagged down? When a gazillion other sites host pirated content but are allowed to get away with it? But no, I did not bother to contest their decision. It’s not worth the effort and besides my earnings from them were just a pittance for this site and could not even seriously buy me my tanning supply. So goodbye Adsense and now I am exploring other income streams.

After all that brouhahaha now I’m really fine with their decision and it did not affect my desire to share whatever creative stuff I come up with for those who can use it. And you know what? My biggest reward is getting comments, especially emailed thanks from scrappers thanking me for the freebies. Also the incoming links from various other sites promoting my work. How cool is that?  And this afternoon I was cleaning out my mediafire account and I was happily surprised coz my freebies had been getting dozens and dozens of downloads.

I never imagined that. So I feel good about this and happy that at least some folks find my postings useful. Thanks so much everyone. More creative freebies in the works for all of you..

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net