Well, social media turned out to be a steaming pile of zilch. Let's use the time you saved not recreating your entire Instagram account or getting anywhere with Facebook to try setting up with advertising instead. How badly could it go if you're actually paying for it? Ahem.

Google Ads has promotions where you can shell out a few bucks and get twice that in credits, or similar. Let's go with that.

Since you don't have a prayer of ranking in a Google search without a full-time search engine optimization team, no one has visited your website yet, but that's okay, because your website efforts are going to come in handy now as an endpoint to direct your ad clickers to.

(Or maybe you have had a few site visitors. It's kind of hard to tell.)

Anyway, basic idea is, you write some stuff, and Google's brilliant algorithm will arrange it in some way that is supposed to be optimized to attract people to click on it and visit your site. You don't actually get to see any of this in action, so you just kind of have to take their word for it.

Go ahead and open a Google Ads account.

Now you're here, you might start to feel a bit giddy. Apparently, anyone with a little cash can just sign up and start having their ads show around the internet. If you're a normal person, you probably don't like being on the receiving end of that. Welcome to the Dark Side.

Justify your incursion into the realms of evil with the idea that if it were an ad for your podcast—your magnificent, delicious little pop-tart of a podcast—popping up, you would actually be interested. So write a few ads that would make even an ad-hater like you click on them. Craft some beautiful lines to hook the casual web scroller. Throw in some amusing details; highlight what makes your show unique. Did you mention it's free? Great! Post those ads for review.

They will be blocked for copyright violation.

I know this is hard to believe, given one of your flagged headlines is literally "Free Podcast," but that is what will happen. Even the podcast art you made yourself in your janky graphics program will be flagged for copyright violation. It does not, of course, tell you whose copyright you're supposed to have violated. Maybe it's yours.

Use the built-in appeal function. Give it a day or so. They will partially acknowledge the ludicrous nature of the situation and excitingly heighten it by unflagging your images but not unflagging "Free Podcast."

Open a support case for that mess. Give Google a few days to underpay some people in another country for their labor. Congratulations! Your ads have been approved. Turns out "Free Podcast" isn't copyrighted. What a relief for us all.

Ah. But you thought of an improvement to your script. Make that update.

Your ads are again blocked for copyright violation. Go to jail. Don't collect $200.

Email support from jail.

Great news! Your ads are approved. I hope you don't have any more edits. Now you can sit back and wait a while for them to start to be "served." To hungry webizens who eat ads for breakfast, I guess.

In the meantime, your ads will again be blocked for copyright violation. Yes, I know you didn't change anything this time. But "Free Podcast" is flagged again, you dastardly plagiarist, you.

At this point you might raise some manner of protest against this Kafkaesque insanity. The support person will ignore your complaint and congratulate you on your newly re-reapproved ads. If you ask again, they might notice your objection and explain that the review process is automatic and there is nothing they can do, but you can conveniently message them and wait days at a time while they manually confirm that "Free Podcast" is not copyrighted.

You might go so far as to suggest there ought to be some sort of bug report filed in this case, but they will explain that it is all managed by the Algorithm and there are no bug reports. I assume the Algorithm has attained sentience and can no longer be stopped.

Great news! Your ads are attracting some clicks! Unfortunately, according to your website analytics, none of them are actually reaching your site. They get you charged and then disappear into the void. Maybe the ads are being served on those skeevy apps/sites that pop up ads quickly to trick people into clicking on them. Now you realize those skeevy apps/sites are not only extremely annoying to users, they're defrauding advertisers. Moving on.

You've gotten a few hundred clicks, but your website data shows no one has actually clicked through to a podcast platform (you could have the ads link to the podcast platforms directly, but there are a lot of them, and linking to some of them will get you fun new errors).

Time to get on a support call. The Ad Specialist will recommend you try a different type of ad.

Repeat all above steps. Receive same results.

Get on a support call. The Ad Specialist will recommend you try a different type of ad.

Repeat all above steps.

This time, your ads are not getting shown at all. Your bid is probably too low. Apparently, even though a click was on the order of a few cents before, the ad campaign the last specialist recommended as having a low "cost per click" suggests a minimum bid of $5 per click. That's just for one click, of course, which so far has a no% chance of listening to your podcast. Yeah.

Throughout this charade they will notify you every other day that you should make your ads more "unique" to get better performance. If you give in and accept their suggested headlines (apparently the only way to boost their automated ad value judgement from "Poor"), they will ban your ads for containing the trademarks (like Spotify, Apple Podcasts) which were in their suggestions.

When you try to get your ads re-re-unbanned, your support case file will fall into the gap behind the counter and be devoured by dust bunnies. You will receive form emails promising a reply within 2 days every 3 – 10 days for months on end. Don't bother trying to reply to these.

Also, there are now new requirements for Google to "verify" your business before your ads will even be shown. You can imagine how well that is going to go.

Maybe Google Ads and podcasts aren't a good match. (And your ads are again blocked for copyright.)