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RETRO TECH
How I Pivoted From Shareware to AdSense: Building a Solitaire Empire
From mailing floppy disks to mastering Google AdSense: How I turned a “gap year” into a decade of passive income.
As recounted in my recent post, How I Sold Shareware by Mail in the 1990s, after creating a small business writing and selling solitaire games online, I found myself at a crossroads.
Newer games were appearing, with vastly improved graphics and gameplay, and supporting hundreds of solitaire variations within a single program. Suddenly solitaire collections were being offered online and at retail. The presentation was slick and professional.
Eventually, products such as Pretty Good Solitaire and SolSuite Solitaire offered over 1,000 different solitaire games in one package, for one low price.
That’s capitalism for you. Good for them.
But as a part-time developer, that was tough to compete against. I made decent money from my games, at their peak, but not enough to quit my day job and focus on games full-time.
The Web Pivot
So I took a different path.
Rather than engaging in an arms race to build the biggest and the best software, I built web sites. I figured out that I could monetize the web site in several ways:
- I could be an affiliate of the big solitaire…
