---
layout: post
title: "How I Made $360 by Serving Markdown to A.I. agents from My Jekyll Blog"
date: 2026-04-11
tags: [ai, jekyll, blogging]
comments: true
---
In April 2025 I wrote [Apologizing for My Obsessiveness Over Punctuation](/2025/04/05/apologizing-for-my-obsessiveness-over-punctuation.html), a post about my various organizational compulsions. Near the end, almost as an aside, I mentioned that I obsessively categorize expenses in [Monarch](https://www.monarchmoney.com/referral?code=8k3crzojhz), a personal finance app, linking it with my referral code. That post earned me exactly one referral in the nine months that followed.

Then, on January 15th, 2026, I wrote [Serving Markdown for AI Agents](/2026/01/15/serving-markdown-for-ai-agents.html). The idea is simple: for every post on this blog, there's now a `.md` version at the same URL. AI agents can discover and fetch clean markdown instead of parsing HTML. I didn't think much of it.

Exactly thirty days later - the length of Monarch's free trial — I started getting a stream of referral conversion notifications without any change in SEO traffic.

Eighteen signups.

<img src="{{ site.url }}/images/posts/2026/2026-04-11-how-i-made-360-dollars-by-serving-markdown-from-my-jekyll-blog/subscriptions.png" />

Twelve converted to paid. At $30/referral, that's **$360**.

<img src="{{ site.url }}/images/posts/2026/2026-04-11-how-i-made-360-dollars-by-serving-markdown-from-my-jekyll-blog/conversions.png" />

We live in the future.