What is more difficult:

To get from 1$/day to 10$ or from 10$/day to 50$?

[HuhuFruFru]

Would be very interesting if you would share your experiences:
Is it easier to get from 1$/day to 10$ or from 10$/day to 50$?

:)

I personally have the feeling that it was much more difficult to break the 10USD/day-limit than 30 USD/day.

[sven1977]

I hope its easier to go from $20 to $100 than from $1 to $20.
This month was my first with an average of $20 per day.

To me, it seemed that the most difficult thing was to get from $1 to $10 per day (took more than 6 months with brand new website). Then from $10 to $20 was not that bad anymore (took only 2 months).

I'm really hoping to quickly get to the 100/day from here on.

[edited by: sven1977 at 4:59 pm (utc) on May 31, 2006]

[Hobbs]

It gets easier with time, you become more experienced and don't waste too much time experimenting, you have a sense of how things work for your site, how your visitors react, it becomes like second nature.
Also you have more traffic with time.

But there is also a saturation point later on.

[hunderdown]

I put AdSense on an existing website, and started out earning $10/day. I'm now up to nearly $30.

In my experience, anyway, no particular increase is harder than another.

The biggest challenge so far was dealing with smart pricing, when it was set up two years ago.

[G_Smitty]

I don't look at it as far as earnings. Since the ECPm and earnings varies and is determined by actual advertisers I concentrate on increasing Traffic. I found that the 10,000 visitors a day mark was the hardest to reach. Increase traffic and your earnings will also increase.

[crick]

I think people with absolute brand new sites can struggle for the first few months, with few rare exceptions, who either buy traffic or just have something on their site that other people just don't and therefore the word of mouth marketing takes over. But once people start getting out of the sand box and start geting some good placements, they start to make good money. So, getting to $10 a day should in theory be a lot more difficult.

[jchampliaud]

I'm trying to go from $10 to $20 a day and I'm finding it much harder than going from 0 to $10 - this happened almost at the start. As for $50 a day I hope to get there sometime!

[ken_b]

As the previous posts indicate, it depends on where you are starting from.

For me, going from $0 - $10.00 was as simple as adding the code to a handful of pages on a site that was several years old.

Going from there to say $30.00 a day was just a matter of adding the code to more pages.

Then it got more interesting, and more profitable. Ad placement came into play for one thing. It really does matter where you put the adblock on your pages, etc.

Then about a year ago I tried Adlinks because Incredibill and others were raving about how well they worked. Presto, my income went up by more than 50% almost immediately. A little tweaking on those things and it's only gotten better.

Which brings up the point that that more you do this the more you are likely to know what works for you and what doesn't. So in some ways it gets easier. In other ways it gets harder because you've done the easy stuff.

[sysfold]

From a different aspect, moving FORWARD as smooth as ken_b did is one thing. When a tide turns BACKWARD and cuts your average down to 75% for an extended period, say 6months, the recovering process is much harder than any sequential forward jump - especially the backward force is beyond your control.

[ken_b]

When a tide turns BACKWARD ...

Fortunately I haven't had that experience, ...yet. And yes, it's been a pretty easy ride for me, but I had 1,200+ pages when I started and probably 500,000 monthly pageviews. So I'm no wonder worker, mostly I was just in the right place at the right time and had this forum to turn to for advice.

I'd like to hear more about this from those who have made a "recovery" though. I'm guessing that would be helpful to a lot of people.

[Hobbs]

especially the backward force is beyond your control

That's the AdsVader, a force that is not always with you. Some believe it is a derivative of SmartPricing TM, others speculate it has to do with Karma, yet another inexplicable force in nature, but many think it has to do with a "Soup Nazi" dude downgrading you with a mouse click saying 'no green for you'!
Battling the AdsVader is a swimming against the tide kind of experience, many publishers perished in the process, AdsVader is cunningly evil but has no defense against fresh content and clean traffic on the long run.