I saw something from Brajeshwar about making $30 in a day off of Text Link Ads (and $100/month off of Google adsense) so I thought I'd go check out Text Link Ads. You might have noticed that I've dropped a few ads on my site in the last year or so mostly just to see what the fuss is about. I hear tales about people actually making money off of their blogs and I thought it'd be cool if it at least paid the hosting and domain name buying bills.
Google used to forbid bloggers from saying how much they made off of adsense, but they now allow you to say how much you've made as long as you don't give details on clicks and keywords and such. So.. last month was a good month for me.. $8.45. Almost paid my hosting bill! Google reported roughly 5,700 page views for the month. Now here's the strange part.. I can look at my log files and see that for last month I had over 4400 page views PER DAY and over 133,000 page views for the month. Look around my site and you'll see that there aren't many pages without adsense ads. I can also look in my logs and see that the most requested pages are all pages with adsense banners on them and it's not like a single visitor is viewing the same page 300 times per day since there wer over 10,000 unique IPs seen last month.. I can see there being some difference as Google probably throws out page views by it's own spiders and my stats app (webalizer) doesn't.. but Google only reporting 1/30th of the page views is kind of odd. Something to look into when I get a chance I guess. (Ideas on where to start looking are appreciated)
Ok, so anyway, I digress.. one of the things I noticed on the Text Link Ads site was that they list the top available sites and give their Alexa rank. Well.. There are personal blogs in the top 9,000 listed here. I checked on some of my favorite Flash sites and found most are in the 100,000 or lower ranking. My site is currently ranked at 400,462. It's apparently fairly easy to game Alexa, and also just as easy to be ranked artificially low.
If you'd like to check Alexa page rankings and you don't care about Alexa having a record of all the sites you visit then you can install the Alexa toolbar for Internet Explorer here http://download.alexa.com/index.cgi
Or there's a tiny FireFox version here: http://www.quirk.biz/download-searchstatus
Privacy be damned, right?
21 Oct 2006 at 01:32 am | #
I think most people do not trust the Alexa result, read the slashdotted article - http://cyber-knowledge.net/blog/2006/10/19/alexa-amazons-most-flawed-idea/. Articles about flawed alexa ranking are rampart on the internet. That is also perhaps one of the many reasons for the opensource ranking site to come up - http://www.quantcast.com/
One of reason for me to earn roughly about $100 through adsense maybe of the following facts too
-- My past 3 months alexa is around 57,958 and Text-Links-Ads looks at it and define the price for ads on my site (currently at $180 per hyperlink per month)
-- Technorati Ranking is 9,652 as of today
-- Average PageViews is 110,673 monthly
-- Average Hit Graphs shows about 310,347 monthly
Btw, it was never this good when I was just concentrating on Flash but with my diverse spread of technology I am involved in. I am able to reach more broader crowd. May be that help. Nonetheless, Flash crowd still remains the major chunk of my loyal audience.
21 Oct 2006 at 08:30 am | #
I just checked the averages for my site:
Analog - 103,000 page views per month.
Webalizer - 135,000 page views per month.
AWStats - 110,700 page views per month
So I'm in the ballpark. The Summer months were kind of slow because I wasn't posting much.
23 Oct 2006 at 10:38 am | #
Not sure why the descrepancy in your pageviews versus adviews. But, I bet you'd get more clicks if you blended your ads better. The color scheme you've chosen will most certainly cause ad blindness. You may also want to place your ads at the bottom of the article. That's where people usually are ready to click on something.
23 Oct 2006 at 12:54 pm | #
I have the same discrepancy between Google Analytics and other stats packages, but my number is about 1/7. The same month, Google measured 110k pageviews whereas my other two stats programs says 738k so the difference is quite visible.
I guess Google is the smarter one that just discards all non-browser traffic?
J
17 Nov 2006 at 03:59 am | #
Hi,
I use statcounter.com for my stats.It is a free service and works very well.