I Hate Being Called A Liar
If there’s one thing I really hate, it’s being called a liar. Particularly by someone who doesn’t know me.
There’s a shameless linkbait post that calls into question whether the online earnings of bloggers that report their earnings, including myself, are genuine. I responded to the post straight away vouching for my own earnings, which I hoped would be the end of it. But, the site author then responded with the following comment:
Everton: After looking at your site you have very limited amount of placement to be earning a great deal of ad revenue, for example Google Adsense. And after looking at your alexa ranking you cant be getting to much traffic to your site and on a 1% click thru ratio i cant see how this is all possible, unless you are clicking on Google Ads yourself.
I don’t know why, but that comment really bugged me and I feel I need to respond as somehow I feel my online reputation is at stake, even though I doubt the site is well-trafficked. I also think my response might be interesting to readers, as it will provide more insight into how a blog can make money.
Limited Ad Placement
Yes, looking at the site currently there is limited direct-ad placement. That is why my direct ad earnings fell over $4k in November. However, just in case Steven you are suffering from ad blindness, there are still other ad schemes running on the page:
- two Adsense units on every page
- two Tribal fusion units on every page
- up to five intellitxt links on every page
- ten text-link ads permanently sold on blog, plus others on forum and directory
- Occassional Feedburner ads
When you have over 500k page impressions a month these schemes can bring in a decent amount of money each month….
Low Alexa Rank
It is a well known fact that Alexa Rank is a poor measure of traffic. Alexa Rank only captures the usage of people who have the toolbar installed, which tends to be bloggers and webmasters. Sites like mine that get traffic from ‘normal’ people i.e. via search engines have tend to have lower Alexa Ranks than sites that have higher ranks because they get a lot of bloggers reading their site, but actually have less traffic. John Chow is a good example where his rank is sub 5k and mine is 18k, despite having 60% more traffic than him.
Even still, I think 17-18k is a pretty ‘good’ ranking, especially when you consider it is higher than sites like www.whatcar.co.uk and www.scoot.co.uk who anyone in the UK can tell you are massive sites.
Low Adsense CTR
I really wish that people would stop saying that a Adsense CTR of 1% is achieved on blogs. My CTR is a lot higher than 1%. I can’t say exactly what it is as I’m not allowed to, but I have posted below proof of my Adsense earnings, which you will see tally up with MyBlogEarnings reports (may be a few cents out due to Google adjustments after month end):
Your CTR is a factor of the type of readers your site receives i.e. via search engines or fellow bloggers, ad placement, the type of content you write about etc. Most blogs don’t make money from adsense because they are blogging about blogging, or what they ate last night, or what they watched on TV etc etc. Google can’t place high earning or interesting ads against these types of posts so hence the CTR and eCPM will always be low.
I did a quick search for ‘Adsense‘ in my search engine and it turned up these old posts which might be interesting to readers:
- 10 Tips To Improve Adsense Earnings
- Improve Adsense CTR - Remove Blog Ads
- 10 Ways To Improve CTRs and CPMs
- Guide To Google Adsense Smart Pricing
Hopefully that finally answers Steven’s questions!
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- MyBlogEarnings For April 2007
Comment by intelligenius on 10 January 2008:
that’s a lot of money and good luck. hope you keep doing better.
Comment by Marcus the Critic on 20 December 2007:
True, especially if your decent content focuses around high paying advertisers. Content related to legal matters and education can bring you almost $100 a day in adsense revs!
Comment by Mad Dozza on 10 December 2007:
I believe you, you can make a killing from adsense if you know what your doing. Decent content, good ad placement and a good subject, the money soon comes rolling in.
Comment by Jack on 10 December 2007:
stephen who?
Comment by Tomaz on 10 December 2007:
I absolutely believe that you earn that much with Adsense. And your top left placement of the first block surely gives you over 5% CTR.
With internet and gadget related topics you must also get a good value per click.
I have a site with Alexa over 300.000 which earns $100 per day from Adsense so I wouldn’t really rely on Alexa. It’s just a very very rough guideline.
Comment by Smackall on 10 December 2007:
I never thought you would be a liar. Coz it was always equal to how much you posted that month. And Everytime I guess your earnings it was someway near by. No doubts on your earnings.
Comment by Dave Starr on 9 December 2007:
The audacity of calling someone a fraud with no proof doesn’t surprise me … the web is like a lot of immature “road rage” drivers, their doors securely looked and seat belts fastened, flipping peopkle off at random to “show their manliness”. Lift their rock and they scurry away like a cockroach.
However it is amazing that people who take it upon themselves to write critiques of other’s methods don’t even know the first thing about the emthod they are offering comments on.
As Opal and Micah and others point out, your numbers are very possible … actually looking at the traffic on the sites where I run AdSense and your traffic, I _know_ it’s possible. A 1% click through rate is way below rates I ahve seen in nearly three years of AdSense publishing. It’s funny, I had a discussion last year with a fellow who is the advertising manager for a large blogging network and he was advising his bloggers to stop using AdSense, citing a less than 1% CTR. As I told him … if you aren’t getting significantly better rates than that you should look at your content and other factors, because Google certainly will perform better than that … if I had properties that added up to 500k PVM my income would be right in the ballpark you state, Everton.
One last note … it’s not the number of ad units that count … in most cases more ad units equal _less_ income, not more. The more AdSense units you put on a site, the more opportunity for very low-pay ads, instead of “thottling” the flow so that only the higher paying ones appear and get clicked.
Comment by Everton on 9 December 2007:
95% is from this domain, the remainder is from another site
Comment by Ryan Perry on 9 December 2007:
All your revenues are just from this site? Or do you have some other domains?