As you can see, we have Google AdSense advertisements on this blog. This is because this blog was originally intended to be just a business tool, for generating ads revenue with content that lurked around unpublished here.
Now, with the first weeks of active advertisements, it might be time for a first evaluation.
Before doing that, here is my original calculation of the expected money:
- In 2008-02 and 2008-03, my personal weblog had 400 unique visitors and 600 pageviews a month, generated nearly exclusively from the 7 IT articles on it via search engine traffic.
- Therefore, each technical article is worth 60-90 page views a month.
- Therefore, the 1100 FAQ articles which are online here on doit.juii.net, equivalenting 500 longer technical articles, are worth 45,000 page views a month.
- Then I assumed an Google AdSense eCPM (earning per 1000 page views with ads) value of 1,50 EUR. This seemed realistically when comparing cyDome’s eCPM comparison values for computer topic.
- 45,000 page views with 1,50 EUR eCPM should be 72,50 EUR a month. More realistically: between 50 and 100 EUR a month.
Now comes current reality: we had 1,381 page impressions, one AdSense click, resulting in 0,13 USD total earnings and 0,09 USD eCPM. May I call this frustrating? With current values, I expect 2,000 page views a month and 0,20 USD total income a month. Even worse, the one click is due to technical evaluation / testing purposes! 🙁
The reasons for this bad performance seems to be that most articles deal with Linux, and Linux users generally avoid to pay money for anything. They really won’t click on advertisements … .
Let’s now look how some big players do the job.
- Here’s an overview of the AdSense earnings in categorie “computers: general” from the admoolah.com AdSense revenue database.
- Here’s what Google says about expectable AdSense earnings. They admit that eCPM in the range of 0,05 to 5 USD is normal.
- Mike earned 2400 USD in 2008-02 with his sites.
- John Chow earned 7011 USD in 2007-02 with his blog. He has also a good how-to for earning money with ones blog.
The result is, in my view: to make a really good amount of money, most important is you need a topic that sells ads (and Linux is poorest for that). Nonsense sells, and, of course, sex sells. But we don’t wanna get into that business, do we. Good ads earnings nearly always compromise good morals. Another thought is this: earning money with a website is reproducable (e.g. by following the how-to of John Chow), but what do you get for that? A day full of the most boring IT work you could imagine: search-engine optimization, tricking search engines, getting advertisements, comparing figures and statistics, HTML and CSS templating, and writing some dummy content where people are interested in. That’s nothing to get passionat about at all, but it seems to be a near full-time job. And instead of filling my life with such stuff, I’m going to select something where I can be passionate about … .
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