I built runclubs.ca about a year ago.

It has gone surprisingly well. Hundreds of people visit every day to find running communities across Canada. New clubs get submitted weekly. Organic search traffic keeps climbing. Everything is trending in the right direction.

Except revenue.

I don’t make any money from it.

And that’s fine — I make my living with my portfolio of Shopify apps. I don’t need this project to make money. But I still feel a pull to take it further. If it did generate revenue, I could reinvest it into more community projects or donate it to people doing similar work.

The challenge is that my entire career has been built on B2B SaaS — not B2C, not blogging, and definitely not directory websites. This space is completely unfamiliar territory.

Why Now?

At DC BKK this year, I talked with a bunch of friends who helped me see that having a site with this much organic traffic is a rare opportunity. It’s a perfect sandbox to learn about SEO, directory monetization, and this whole world of content-driven business models in 2025.

If runclubs.ca existed in 2012, I could have taken a basic SEO course, done some link-building, watched a few affiliate-marketing YouTube videos, and probably turned it into a decent business without too much trouble.

But 2025 is a different world.

ChatGPT is consuming huge portions of search traffic, the economics of content have shifted, and most people I know who used to run content sites have moved on.

Which honestly makes it feel even more like an interesting learning challenge.

The Goal

Make $5,000 USD/month from runclubs.ca within the next 12 months
(by December 1, 2026).

This series will cover the experiments I run — and the ones I inevitable fail — along the way.

Experiment #1: Ads

Why Ads?

Whenever I talk about runclubs.ca, ads are the first suggestion people bring up. They’re everywhere, they’ve always existed, and for many sites they’re the default monetization method.

Personally, I hate them.
I’m a privacy geek and a full-time ad-block user. I especially dislike Google AdSense.

But after chatting with friends in Bangkok, I realized I’ve never actually tried running ads myself. And despite my feelings, the idea is tempting:
“Free money from pageviews.”

So I decided to try it.

Setup

I turned on Google’s auto-optimized AdSense setup. The site gets around 200 users a day — roughly 400–600 pageviews — so based on common AdSense calculators, I expected maybe $10–15 USD per month.

That’s obviously nowhere near my goal, but I figured it was worth testing. Maybe the running niche has higher CPMs?

Two weeks ago, I enabled AdSense across the site.

The Results (1 Month In)

Exactly what I expected.

Right after enabling ads, I left for a meditation retreat in Thailand for a week. Then I flew to Vietnam and spent the next 10 days exploring Ho Chi Minh City with a friend — completely forgetting I had even turned AdSense on.

When a DC friend finally asked how the experiment was going, I logged back in and saw… exactly what the calculators predicted.

After 30 days, AdSense earned $13.63 CAD.

Technically not zero, but nowhere near useful.

And more importantly: it isn’t worth the trade-offs.

The User Experience Dumpster Fire

The worst part wasn’t the low revenue — it was the ads themselves.

Google’s “Auto Ad Optimization” inserted an absurd number of banners, slide-outs, and text-link ads across the site. It completely destroyed the user experience:

• Layout shifting
• Pages jumping around
• Ugly banners everywhere
• Hard to scroll on mobile
• Club info pushed down the page

The simple, clean, easy-to-scan directory became a cluttered mess.

I’ve already deleted my AdSense account, so I don’t have screenshots (which is for the best — I don’t want that version of the site preserved anywhere online). But trust me: it was bad.

Moving Forward

I hope I never have to use AdSense or anything similar again.
This experiment satisfied my curiosity, and now I know for sure:

Ads are not the monetization path for runclubs.ca.