We can blame so many entities for the cause of this recession, but we need to focus on more important issues like, “where has all your ad revenue gone?” Since early 2008 smaller website owners have been curious, “why have I gone from a 1 dollar a day to almost nothing?” What can you do as a publisher to increase your revenue? What will happen if you go against the “Terms of Service” regulated by ad companies?
Your web site is your business, this is your business model. You call the shots, and you want to work and make money. Anyone that has their own domain name, and started from scratch can appreciate the hard work it takes to develop a site, maintain the site content, and try and grow the site to be a fierce competitor in the web world.
What is important to site owners, and not so important. If you had started a website more than two years ago you envisioned some serious monthly revenue to help offset your regular jobs pay. Some sites state that they had an all time high pay of $1,800 dollars for a month. But remember it takes top quality content, and visibility to reach these pecuniary landmarks. You have to play by the rules in order to get visibility, and you have to rack your brain in order to write quality content.
Whether you run a cms site that hosts thousands of videos, or you write a blog about music from the 80’s you put your best effort into the entertainment world. If 2007 proved to be lucrative for your site, you felt 2008 would be even better. But then one day you look at your adsense account and see your ads are paying anywhere from 40 to 60 percent less. There are many reason for the decline in ad revenue, and we will not even try and dissect those reasons. You don’t want excuses, you want the cash. We are now into 2009 and ads just aren’t what they used to be.
What do you do now? Look at the variables. What is your page rank? What is your alexa trend look like? Quantcast, Compete? These are all legitimate concerns. You have heard that PR is important, and you fear that going with another advertiser such as text link ads, might hurt your page rank.
The solution is do not focus your sites success by PR, do not worry about search terms. And most importantly sign up for advertising that fits your needs. If linkworth has a shot at paying you more than adsense use it. We are not in the SEO business so some critics might cringe at this article. What we are here to do, is to let you know that if you continue to stay with ad companies that are producing far less than a year ago and choose not to move, than expect your income trend to stay the same.
When talking about change, and the consequences or repercussions because of it let’s look at pinoymoneytalk.com. We used the search term “website earnings down.” Plug this term into yahoo search, and pinoymoneytalk.com is number 2. Now do the same search in google, and they are number 23. This puts them on the third page, which by web theory is not all that visible. Now compare search results, and you will see that in google there are irrelevant sites on the first page. Also as a note pinoymoneytalk.com has a pr of 0, but this site has an alexa rating of 43,590 with 406 inbound links. These links are from sites with high PR. That number tells me that this site has a high traffic volume, and with numbers like that people are more apt to revisit, as the content is rich and valuable. We don’t know, or want to know if pinoymoneytalk.com is being punished by google or not. We are normally don’t use google for search since, we want relevant information, and we know that we can get that using search engines that don’t model the Wal-mart philosophy of conquering the world.
If your site is small in traffic numbers, and small in pay. There becomes the decision, do you follow the google-mart model, and get paid a insignificant amount of money, or do you spread your wings, and go after some real cash. This is not a plea to revolt against google. This is more of an intervention, to level the playing field, and help remind the big search engines that it is the small and medium sites that help fill their indexes with relevant content.
resource sites, and other goodies
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adsense/3894138.htm
http://www.adscam.typepad.com/
http://www.mt-soft.com.ar/2009/04/04/removing-advertising-or-not-advertising-will-show-credibility/
One Comment, Comment or Ping
sad web pay
Yup, I have dropped from 4-5 bucks a day to averaging 30 cents a day. I am dumping adsense, and going with Kontera. There are lots of reasons for the decline in advertising, however ad companies like google should’nt be itting us smaller sites so hard
Apr 22nd, 2009
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