Adsense Experiment

Back in April, I wrote a post about the Grand Canyon Skywalk. It got submitted to Digg and Reddit, which brought in just under 150,000 unique visitors. A month later, the post was still getting hits, so I decided to try an experiment: see how much I could earn by putting Adsense. I wanted to answer 2 questions: First, can Adsense actually bring in any real money on a site like mine? And second, what can someone running a site like this do to increase revenue?

To answer the first question, the results. Over that time period, the Grand Canyon post got 11,585 hits, resulting in 76 clicks, and earning me $8.07. That means someone clicks on an ad link an average of once every 152 page views, or just under 1 click per day. Each click was worth, on average, 10.6 cents, which works out to .069 cents per page view.

Now some hypotheticals. First, let's assume that I had put Adsense on the Grand Canyon post when I first posted it. With 145,772 hits at .069 cents per hit, theoretically I could have earned $101.54 in two and a half months. Not too shabby if I just want to pay for some bandwidth. But unfortunately, that's probably a bit high. My guess is that Digg and Reddit users, the majority of people coming to that article, would be less inclined to click on Adsense links, bringing the average down. If we assume it was only half as many clicks per views, that's still $50, pretty good. If I had put Adsense on the entire site, assuming the same click through rate, I potentially could have made $195 since February. Again, not bad, but as before, probably inflated somewhat. Around $100 might be more realistic, meaning about $200 per year, which is pretty good if I just wanted to put it towards hosting costs (if I needed to; fortunately, Keacher has been kind enough to host the site for me on his server).

So what can I do to increase my revenue? The first and most obvious answer is to put Adsense on all my pages, and more ads on each page. I've been tempted to do this, but at this point I'd prefer to keep my pages clean and only put ads on the posts that are going to generate a lot of traffic. So what I really need are more big hits, and potentially a trigger system to start Adsense on a post once the traffic reaches a certain volume. That might be possible. I'll have to write more, which I want to do anyways, and maybe focus my topics a little more. Lastly, if I really want to make money from ads (which I'm not truly focused on), I should try to write about things on the list of most expensive AdWords like 'loan consolidation', 'car insurance', 'structured settlement', 'refinancing', and 'auto quotes'. Of course, I don't really have anything to write about any of those, but maybe I can come up with something.

Just out of curiosity, how do you feel about Adsense, in general and on this site? (If you can't see the ads, just click the permalink to this post.)

Posted July 16, 2007 - Four Comments