Archive for May, 2007

Chad wrote a decent post titled “The 7 Levels of Revenue for Your Blog“.

It’s a decent post. Not perfect, but basically dead on. His main point is that AdSense sucks. It has some good points, like paying out on all international traffic (unlike most ad networks) and being a very easy way for any blogger to make money very early on.

Chad took some flack from folk like Steve Pavlina and Vince Cordic. They both basically said that earning less than $5CPM means you’re doing something wrong.

Steve Pavlina: If your Adsense CPM is below $5, I’d say you probably haven’t optimized it very well. A $1 CPM is extremely weak.

Vince Cordic: If you can’t get a CPM of at least $5-10 with Adsense, your doing something seriously wrong.

Yeah. So, guys, let’s put your money where your mouth is. Actually, let’s put my money where your mouth is.

Get our AdSense eCPM across the network to 5-10eCPM and I’ll send you a cheque for $10,000 (US). Easy as pie, eh? I mean it must be easy if y’all can throw around figures like 10CPM. 10CPM per unit on a network our size would net us something like 400K/month in revenue. Just from AdSense. So I’d love to see it, and am more than willing to be proven wrong on Chad’s point that most folk get about a buck, and that’s with a fair amount of work.

See here’s the thing. I’ve been at this for awhile, and know most of the high-end AdSense guys personally. I have a good relationship with the AdSense team, and b5media makes a decent amount of money from AdSense. But I still hate it.

So let’s see if it’s just my hate that’s getting in the way of common sense, or if it’s something else.

Here are a list of 5 sites doing more than half a million pages a month in traffic (so smaller numbers don’t skew things):

• Hilary News
• MTV Reality World
• Gilmore Girls News
• Snarky Gossip
• Lohan Groupie

The sites combined are currently averaging about 30c CPM per unit, on about 100K impressions a day (we’ve been phasing AdSense out pretty aggressively of late).

If you’re interested in the 10K prize, simply send me a list of changes. I’ll blog them (so others know ahead of time what’s being done). Take a screenshot before and after, and post the percentage change (I’ll also find someone external to serve as an independent judge to confirm results, so we can’t, y’know, lie).

If you’re able to increase the per-unit eCPM by a given amount, I’ll give you a given prize (each prize can only be claimed once):

• 1st prize: Average eCPM $5 – 10K
• 2nd prize: Average eCPM $4 – 3K
• 3rd prize: Average eCPM $3 – $2000 in ads across the b5media blog network

As always, there are some restrictions (these are off the top of my head and may change as folk try and get sneaky). These restrictions basically boil down to 1 point: our content is king, and we refuse to do anything that’s going to ruin our user experience. You can feel free to do whatever you want on your site, but for us a subscriber or return user who truly values our content is way more important than a $1 click.

A list of these, off the top of my head:

• Nothing in the posts themselves. Period. It converts stupidly well for AdSense specifically because it tricks users. Tricking users means sending them away. They’ll never come back. That’s bad for business.
• Nothing black-hat or that’s been specifically frowned on by Google. This would include images beside ads, making ads blend into content more than they’re supposed to, etc.
• No more than the standard number of units per page. Including hidden units and so forth (you’d think this would fall under the above but as I said, I’ve been at this for awhile and heard the whole “if only you’d do this one thing that isn’t technically cool by Google you could double your earnings”).

That’s the short list.

Is it fair? Maybe not. But the number of times AdSense “guru’s” have told us we could double or triple our revenues only to find that their advice amounts to “start high-paying blogs, dump them full of useless search engine content, create false pages, trick users and mix ads into your content” is appalling.

As I said, if you want to push your readers away, that’s fine. But for me, as a blogger, and for us, as a blog network… Readers are important to us. Every single one. It does me no good at all to engage in tactics which earn us tonnes of money the first month, but slow our growth, demotivate our bloggers and turn us from a very real content company into nothing more than a glorified splog network.

So if you have real suggestions that will actually drive up revenue in a sane, legal and cool way that won’t interfere with our users’ experience, bring it on! I’d be more than happy to be proven wrong. I mean, my money’s on the table. It’s waiting. You have live sites with real data, real traffic and what should be an easy means of increasing revenue. I’m not even requiring 5-10CPM to win this. Increase it to the rate we get on some of our graphical remnant ads (nevermind our premium stuff) and I’ll pay you money.

Hell, if you’re that good I’d probably make you a job offer! :-D

Easy, right? ;-) Sure it is. Come and take my money if earning massive CPMs on AdSense is so easy!