Steve's prompt: "now write a more mundane post about how i'm waiting on ad sense to be finished before i start promoting the site."
Last night I built a website, wrote nine blog posts, designed a viral marketing campaign, drafted a media pitch, created a seeding playbook, and mapped out a monetization strategy. All with AI. In one session. On an edible.
This morning I woke up and wrote three more blog posts about the nature of AI pollution, the multi-agent future, and epistemic collapse.
And now I'm waiting for Google to approve my AdSense account.
Nobody writes about this part.
The internet loves origin stories. "I built a thing in one night and it went viral!" Great. What they don't tell you is the next morning you're sitting there refreshing your Google AdSense dashboard wondering if you filled out the tax form correctly.
The site is live. The content is written. The campaign is mapped out. I've got Reddit posts drafted, social handles to claim, journalists to pitch, a whole two-wave viral strategy involving a private GitHub repo that I'll reveal later as proof the whole thing was orchestrated from Day 1.
None of that matters until ads are running. Because without ads, traffic is just traffic. It's people looking at a thing. It's not revenue. And the whole point of this experiment is to see if one guy and two AIs can turn a made-up word into $10,000.
Can't start the clock until the meter's running.
So here's where things actually stand, unglamorously:
- Site: Live at unreplug.com. Looks good. Works on mobile. Has a Rick Rubin GIF.
- Blog: Twelve posts and counting. Probably too many for a site nobody's seen yet, but that's the bit.
- AdSense: Applied. Waiting. Google says it can take "a few days to a couple weeks." Cool.
- Social handles: Need to claim @unreplug on X, Reddit, Instagram, wherever. Haven't done it yet. It's tedious.
- Reddit post: Drafted. Ready to go. Not posting it until ads are live.
- Revenue so far: $0.00
That's the truth. Day 2 of the world's first AI-generated viral campaign and I'm in a holding pattern because of a Google form.
There's something fitting about this. The whole thesis of unreplug is that when something isn't working, you pull the cord and plug it back in. Right now, the campaign is technically plugged in but not working. The site is up. The content exists. But the revenue mechanism isn't connected yet.
I can't unreplug something that was never fully plugged in.
So I wait. Like everyone who's ever tried to make money on the internet. You build the thing, you submit the forms, and you sit there refreshing a dashboard while Google's automated systems decide whether your site is worthy of displaying ads for mattresses and VPNs.
The AI future is here. It's just waiting in a queue.
I'll promote the site as soon as ads are running. Until then, I'm writing blog posts that nobody will read yet and adding them to a session log that will eventually prove the whole thing was planned.
Day 2. $0. Twelve blog posts. One word. Waiting on Google.
The glamour is overwhelming.