europeforvisitors - 1:00 am on Aug 18, 2006 (gmt 0)

Ronburk, that's a great post, although I take issue (just a little bit) with one statement:

20% of your pages will get you about 80% of your earnings, so you end up "wasting" (assuming we ignore secondary effects) 80% of your time.

Let's assume, for the sake of discussion, that the 80/20 rule is 100% reliable, and that 20% of your pages are generating 80% of your AdSense earnings.

The other 80% of your pages (the ones that generate 20% of your earnings) are still making money. Maybe not as much money as your top-earning pages, but if the pages are "evergreen," the traffic and revenue will add up over time. For example, on a site that earns $5,000 a month, the low-performing pages are pulling in $1,000 a month or $12,000 a year--enough to pay the rent or the grocery bill or a year's college tuition in many cases.

Also, those 80% of your pages that produce only 20% of the revenue may be helping to bring in the users who generate 80% of your revenue on your "money" pages. I've certainly found that to be true of affiliate revenues, and I'd guess that it's true of AdSense revenues, too. (Although I rank high in Google's organic SERPs for a number of "money" terms, nearly all of the traffic on my "money" pages comes from other pages within the site.)

I'm not disagreeing with the overall thrust of your post, by the way; you make a number of very good points, and I hope more than a handful of people read this thread before it gets lost in the forum's noise.