Comments
Comment by Simone Manganelli:
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This seems like a very sensible solution. I was actually considering doing something like this, because I too have noticed that a whole ton of my traffic comes from random visitors who found my weblog via a Google search.
If you don’t mind giving out your statistics, I was wondering what your average number of unique visitors per day is, the percentage of users from search engines, and eventually, if you find this method to be a practical way of making money from your weblog. I know you use Google Analytics, as do I, so if you could give me the numbers from there, they would be comparable to mine. Then I can compare my traffic to yours to see if it would work out for me too. If you don’t want to give this info publicly, feel free to send it to me by e-mail.
Of course, if you don’t want to give out this info, I completely understand. Just thought I’d ask.
Comment by ssp:
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It’s probably good to take everything I say with a huge dash of salt as I find it rather difficult to read web statistics.
According to the Google tool (which I have only started trying when they switched to their new interface recently, so I don’t really have a lot of experience with that) there should be around a thousand visitors a day. The awstats software on the server suggests there’s twice that.
No idea where that difference comes from. I could imagine people filtering the Google stuff, Google being better at reliably tracking repeat visitors or simply spammer scripts not loading the Google stuff as reasons. Which in total makes me guess that the more conservative number of Google is also more realistic.
According to both statistics tools, the Search engine referrers should make about half of the traffic.
And no, the Caribbean was definitely meant as a joke. These pages are absolute no way to make money. I am happy if I can cover (the not too high) server costs and other technical costs. There is no way this could compensate my efforts financially. Just look at the pages, subjects changing at my whim, really far out subjects being written on. That’s not the cheerful mainstream (and I might add obvious or dull) choice of topics which appeals to the larger numbers whom you’d need to make things profitable.
Comment by gummi:
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I read elsewhere another idea about ad placement. Only place adverts on content that’s anywhere between a month to six months old.
Comment by Simone Manganelli:
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Cool. Thanks for the info about your statistics. You get 7-10 times the amount of visitors I do, and a much smaller proportion of them come from search engines.
By the way, I suppose “practical way of making money from your weblog” was a poor choice of words. What I meant was not whether you can make a living or even make a substantial amount of income off your weblog, but rather whether it was worth it to gum up your pages with ads, even if it is only for the probably-one-time visitors. For instance, if I were to implement this and only make $1/month off of ads, it’s completely not worth it. If I made $50 or $100/month, then maybe I might think about it. But obviously you can’t live off of $1200/yr anyway. :P
Comment by ssp:
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gummi: I somehow doubt that - particularly as many of my pages with the search engine visitors are more than a year old. I’ll keep an eye on it, to see whether or not this is right for my pages.
Simone: The ‘worth it?’ question is a good one. I am really not sure. It pays the server bills and buys a few drinks. So if I had a higher income, I’d probably just buy those things myself – if only for aesthetic reasons. Like this it helps a bit and I have to admit that I also find it quite interesting to see how these things work, what is ‘successful’ and what isn’t.
It probably all comes down to the effort you put into making ad-money. If you adjust your topics and your writing accordingly (short texts on commonly searched topics, noncontroversial, pages focusing on good search engine, photos). Unfortunately I find it hard to do that as I might end up not-liking my on pages in that situation.
Comment by d.w.:
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ssp: nice idea
I know exactly one person who’s actually managed to make a living blogging, and he posts upwards of a dozen times a day, across a half-dozen blogs, and has pages that are frankly choked with ads.
I lack that sort of commitment to Sparkle Motion.
Comment by ssp:
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Simone: The search engine vs. other referral ratio has been like this for a while on this site. But I don’t have a lot of experience with or knowing what is typical. I also don’t know how different analysis tools affect this (how do they recognise search engine referrers?). Also I wonder how RSS readers skew the statistics (Google’s numbers just don’t know about RSS, with the other analysis tools it’s not clear to me where those numbers are included and where they aren’t. It’s all a big mystery… and I don’t care enough to really dig into this and learn about all the technicalities of log analysis.
d.w.: I hope I made clear that I just stole the idea. And those quick’n’dirty posts certainly aren’t my type of thing. It’d leave me feeling ‘empty’. Although it certainly beats a proper McJob and it’s amazing how placing some words between banners can gain you real money.
Comment by Simone Manganelli:
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Well, thanks for the insight. Let us know how this experiment goes.
Comment by gummi:
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I read elsewhere another idea about ad placement. Only place adverts on content that’s anywhere between a month to six months old.
gummi: I somehow doubt that - particularly as many of my pages with the search engine visitors are more than a year old. I’ll keep an eye on it, to see whether or not this is right for my pages.
Sorry, should have made that clearer. One could only place ads on content that is older than a month to six months. Year old content would lie within that remit.
Comment by Simone Manganelli:
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Any word on how this is going after 3.5 months?
Comment by ssp:
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I made other changes to the site recently which affected traffic quite a bit. So it’s hard to tell. My impression is that there has been a slight ‘improvement’ on per visitor money but nothing mind boggling.
