AdSense One Year In
I started using AdSense ads in my various Web pages here on Feb. 16, 2006. It's been a year now, and a closer look has been instructive. (See my February 22, 2006 entry for a summary of my thoughts going in.)
My original idea was to see if a writer can make money on the ad model. Most of the places I used to sell short technical pieces are now gone, and the computer book market is all but dead, for various reasons, some of them still obscure. (Excess capacity from the 90s is the worst of it-hand-in-hand with the fact that our Windows systems have now been mature for at least seven years, and people have all the Windows 98 and 2000 books that they'll ever need.) My site gets a fair amount of traffic: Taken together, my several live domains get between a third and a half million page hits per month. Duntemann.com alone gets an average of 12,000 unique visitors per month. My logic went like this: If I succeed spectacularly, others can too, but if I fail spectacularly, the AdSense system may be too fluky to invest much time in.
So. Much now depends on how you define "success."
I shake my head sometimes looking at Googls's output reports. When I began placing AdSense ads (as a part of the general upgrading of the look of my Web pages, some of which go back to 1995) I remember thinking, "Well, if I can make a dollar a day I'll be happy." And voila! Month after month, my monthly and running averages never strayed more than a few pennies from a dollar a day. It makes you wonder if there really is something to that New Age "Law of Attraction" BS. (I suspect if I could force myself to write books about the Law of Attraction, I'd make considerably more than a dollar a day.)
The average for the year was $1.02 per day, for a total of $371.65. My hosting costs came to $203.40 for that period, so I cleared $168.25. Now, I wrote none of the articles specifically to make money with AdSense, and almost certainly would have written them anyway, so in a sense it was free money and worth grabbing. Adding AdSense ads is certainly trivial enough (basically cut here, paste there) assuming you left space on your pages to hold them. I will confess it was motivation to redesign my general Web presence, which had been pretty ugly prior to 2005.
It's also interesting to stack up how individual pages did, ad-wise:
Homebrew Radio Gallery $98.41 Assembly Language Books and Links $61.55 ContraPositive Diary $40.98 12V "Space Charge" Tubes $33.94 Hi-Flier Kites $31.13 Finding Parts for Tube Projects $16.49 Installing Turbo Delphi $11.48 Tetra-Brik Wi-Fi Antenna How-To $10.83 Tom Swift: An Appreciation $9.63 Wardriving FAQ $9.53 Vintage Component Data Sheets $7.83 So What Is "Degunking"? $7.77 Understanding "Lyke Wake Dirge" $1.88
The big surprise here is my homebrew radio gallery, which is nothing more than photos of things I've built over the years, plus brief descriptions. No technical data, no how-to. Just pictures. It doesn't even get that much traffic; typically 15% of what the Contra main page gets, and yet it generally earns about 50% more than Contra, taking out the spike that came in when Boing Boing aggregated it last May. The take for the article I wrote on Turbo Delphi is an anomaly, because it all came in within a few weeks of the page's mounting, when people were the craziest to figure out how to install it.
I think the key is pertinent ads. When viewing the Homebrew Radio Gallery, it shows ads for tubes, test equipment, and other things that people interested in tube projects might want. At the other end of the scale, the ads placed on "Understanding 'Lyke Wake Dirge'" are virtually all mistakes, keyword ads that misinterpret the keywords on the page. "Wake Forest Real Estate" advertises there a lot, as does a puzzling ad offering "SQF Audits for Cereal" that promise to "Wake up your sales!" (One wonders what a cereal auditor does. I can't just go look; you can't click on your own ads.)
I suspect I could do better by deliberately writing Web articles about mainstream products that people are more likely to research than a 14th century English folk melody. If time allows I may try that. But I've also noticed that revenue per click-thru is drifting downward, which is why my total average revenue has stayed the same even as I've added more pages and attracted more traffic. I think that Google searchsquatters (who typically scrape content verbatim from Wikipedia and surround it in AdSense ads) are gradually scaring off the advertisers. AdSense works for low-traffic sites like mine because it's almost entirely automatic. Subversion may eventually kill it; the money isn't there for proctors to monitor where the ads go. The big money is in ads placed deliberately on big-traffic pages, and eccentric topics like those I cover don't attract big traffic.
Bottom line? I'm sticking with it, and with some luck I'll continue to get a dollar a day. I said I would be happy with that, and I am. It's not like I have to live on it, but as a writer who used to get at very least hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars for magazine articles, that's scant comfort.