Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Here's the stats:
- Weblogs, Inc. = 70+ different niche blogs
- total 20 million monthly page views
- $600 a day in AdSense
- $45,000 for the first 4 months.
Can't talk about our earnings in relation, but given the massive amount of page views these guys get per month, I'm happy with how we're doing.
Still, realistically, paying for 70 bloggers? That much bandwidth? Etc. I know Weblogs sells other advertising, and this is a nice supplement to that ad revenue, but on its own its nowhere near enough to support such a massive endeavour on its own.
Something to ponder,
Hunter
I haven't seen if they have other advertising, but I would figure they would need to bring it atleast $1k a day to pay the bloggers (if they paid them $5-10 a day) and still get some profit.
50% of every page is given over advertising, PLUS they put adsense rectangles in the content itself.
A while ago someone was asking if you have "too much" advertising. IMHO this blog is an example of too much.
Much visitors,
but a pathetic low page impressions per visitor
I guess most of these page views are actually RSS feeds. Most blogs promote RSS heavily due to bandwidth costs, but these are "professional" blogs.
I think I can compare myself (single site, 3 million pages/month) and say "I'm doing well" :)
20,000,000 pages per month = ~ 650,000 per day
650,000 * 11 ads per page (3 adblocks)
=7,150,000 ads per day
$600 / 7,150,000 = $.08 CPM
That does seem pretty low. Is my math right?
20,000,000 pages per month = ~ 650,000 per day
650,000 * 3 adblocks
=7,150,000 ads per day
$600 / 7,150,000 = $.31 CPM
Which is still horrible. I would expect single digit CPM, even from blogs.
1) No, that IS the total for the whole 70+ network of blogs. If Google could parade that just one blog made $600 a day, believe me, they would. And Weblogs would have made far more than $45,000 in 4 months as the slide says.
2) Total agreement that its a terrible CPM, no matter how you cut it.
But look at it this way - Jason (Weblogs owner) has undoubtably figured a way to play his people already, since they just added AdSense in the summer. Therefore its like unearthing an extra $600 a day he didn't expect. So long as his company gets to keep most or all of it, its a bonus.
Can he do better? Absolutely - there's a lot of things he could do to improve that. But you always have to balance effort in with the money out. Let's say he could double his daily amount... would it justify hiring someone who could work on that to increase it that amount? Maybe, maybe not. Just finding someone who could improve it would be a challenge (as we're all doing this for ourselves, right?) Meanwhile he generates some income from it.
3) Forget comparing Alexa to ANYTHING. My best site is in the 150,000 range, peaked to 72,000 ... but our *actual traffic* is only 20% less than our competitor who is in the Alexa 5,000 or less range. And our revenue is on par with them!
Alexa is so badly skewed it isn't worth anything. Our competitor's site targets more to novice webmasters with the Alexa toolbar installed. There's the difference in Alexa numbers. Realistically, he should be listed at, say, 120,000 or something. Or we should be 7,000.
4) Speaking again of the poor CPM - ask me if I'm *suprised* that those blog ads are performing so poorly? I'm *not*, not in the least. If you think about it, understand the visitors and their intentions, you'll understand what I'm talking about and why.
5) I also think anyone reading the blogs via RSS aren't really "counted" in the overall page views. It'd be cutting your own throat to count visitors you can't serve ads to.
Although I still think the numbers are just for the one blog.
And the ads are pretty badly targetted. Half of them are "make money with your affiliate" type ads. No wonder their revenue is so low.
I mean, really, really horrible. A story on a new supercar, and an Adsense ad on tires.
You can say that's not really horrible, its more or less related, but if I see a tire ad on my page about ANY supercar, out goes that page, I will chuck that story out till Adsense gets some commonsense.
That referral line refers the adsense bot to an outside 3rd party website (or possibly an internal page) which already enjoys good targeting so the ads are the same as on the other website or page.
I have seen a number of sites doing this, both large and small traffic sites. The owner of one of the high traffic sites I visit said G gave him permission to do it, which seems true or else the system would ignore the extra line of code, so G must have programmed for it, right?
However, if you ask them for permission (I already did a few times) to also do it they reply absolutely no changes to the script are allowed according to the TOS. That is why I never implemeted it though I am not too thrilled to see others using it, including competing websites, without any problems and getting great ads vs my sometimes poor trageting or PSA's.
Wouldn't it be fabulous if the Googleguy addressed this issue. Any comments from anyone else!
[edited by: trader at 5:00 pm (utc) on Feb. 11, 2005]
Honestly, its not, its a system-wide number. We have some small sites that we started and dropped because they paid in a similarly miserable fashion: so low as to not worth bothering with.
It's not hard to imagine that the majority of his traffic avoids the AdSense, especially with all the banners competing for attention, and that the ads are consistently poorly targetted. At least its not hard to imagine from my experience.
But hey - write Jason, or Google, or Paidcontent to confirm, and let us know. :-)
As for Alexa & # of page views as a comparsion: more page views per visitor doesn't necessarily correlate to more revenue. And maybe its Alexa people who don't stay as long as your non-Alexa visitor. It really depends on the site topic - again, I've seen sites with webmaster-related content that show a high ranking and a lot of page views but aren't reflective of the majority of the site's non-Alexa users.
3) Forget comparing Alexa to ANYTHING. My best site is in the 150,000 range, peaked to 72,000 ... but our *actual traffic* is only 20% less than our competitor who is in the Alexa 5,000 or less range. And our revenue is on par with them!
I'm curious where you got your competitors traffic numbers - Alexa?
My experience with Alexa has been that it seems (on most days) to match my actual site traffic relatively closely. When my site traffic went up 30%, so did my alexa rank, when it went up another 30%, so did Alexa as well. Now exceeding a million page views a month I seem to be ranking with other million page view sites and those with 1/2, 1/3 or 1/4 my traffic appear to rank appropriately.
# I also know how much traffic my wife's company gets (about 15x my site) and they rank in the top 1,000.
# One of my customers has about 2.5x my traffic and ranks about 4,000 ahead of my site.
# Another customer has about 1/2 my traffic and ranks about 40,000 below my site.
I did a competitive survey of 10 competing sites by getting their advertising media kits. Those with traffic similar to what I used to have, had similar rankings. Likewise, those with more traffic had higher rankings, etc. Overall, I was actually fairly impressed with how close Alexa seemed to be on target with their voodoo magic.
Back to the topic of Weblogs, Inc., I just checked their rank on Alexa and it's in the 6,000s which is what I would expect for a site with that much traffic.
I guess my question is:
How did your results come out so skewed as everything I've seen to date in Alexa seemed to be close enough for government work?
- $600 a day in AdSense
Have you went to their web site and looked to see where the google ads are positioned?
Below their direct ads, about mid-page to bottom-page most of the time, very poor location, I actually had to look twice to find them. I'm surprised they make as much as they do considering how far I had to scroll to get to the ads on most pages!
Just another example of adsense being used as backfill advertising. Most people posting here will be using adsense as the major form of advertising - hence better CPM.
I got my competitor's numbers right from his blog. :-) I also track a few other sites from previous job experiences, and I compare notes with a few friends. I know part of our low ranking comes from that fact that our site simply targets internet newbies way, way more than our competitor.
And I agree w/ the poster who said that AdSense is backfill - pretty darn good backfill considering everything.
We do know from Google itself that the *right* kind of blog and ad placement can result in excellent numbers. Remember the Mobile Phone blogger who was making something like $4,500 a month? That's $150 a day - just one blog making 1/4 of all of Weblog's daily revenue. (Although to be fair he had pretty daily high traffic, too... but I don't think he was within 1/4 of Weblogs daily traffic.)
"Some sites are under $1 (CPM), some are $12... you know how that goes. We are running TF (TribalFusion) as well, and learning how to optimize.
We don't run Google on every page of course... we've had a lot of times when Engadget and Autoblog have been totally sold out, so I think your math is a little off.
Cellphones--like your site--are great... trying having a video game site (think .50 eCPM!): ouch!
anyway... the numbers in this were a little off, but we're loving Google and what they do for our readers, bloggers and company."
BTW, in another blog entry he states that $2 - $5 CPM is easy with any start-up blog (the way they do banner ads) and that $8 - $12 is what his best blogs make.
Do the math - 20,000,000 page views = 670,000 a day x $7 (?) average across his network = $4,690 a day for his banner ads.
Add another $18k in Google Adsens, and that's $158,000 a month to pay 70 bloggers, his salary, and his sales team? Wild guesses, here. Could be more if more if his gadget blogs weight heavier in traffic and CPM. And so on.
Isn't the real reason Google are promoting this, is to show that sites with 20m pageviews per month, use Adsense.
To show a site earning $600 per day from 600,000 pageviews per day is crazy.
If the majority of webmasters on this site had these figures we would sack our programmers.
Nice to see someone defending Alexa :)
dregs33
I've also found that my rankings go up and down with traffic, and the three-month averages are fairly stable in terms of where my site ranks in comparison to the other sites in my category that I monitor.
It's worth noting that, according to Alexa, the three-month averages are the ones you should be watching, and rankings shouldn't be taken too seriously until a site is in the top 100,000.
(FWIW, my site's traffic has jumped about 30% since the latest Google update, and I'm seeing that reflected in Alexa's traffic graph. The three-month average hasn't yet gone up much, for the simple reason that it's a three-month average.)
Other things to consider:
1) Rankings shouldn't be taken literally; they're most useful in tracking movement in relation to other sites within a category.
2) The rankings do help to show who may be a player in a category and who's unquestionably an also-ran. In my field (travel), PR people often use Alexa rankings to decide whether a media outlet is worth cultivating.
3) Unfortunately, there are no 100% reliable (or even 75% reliable) traffic-monitoring services on the Web, because even the big rating services can be fooled. A few years ago, FORBES ran a story about how About.com jacked up its rankings in Media Metrix by having pages served as popunders through an ad network. And some of you may remember when X10.com ranked as one of the top sites on the Web because it served so many millions of popup or popunder ads that registered as Web pages and "unique visitors." (If it's any consolation, traditional media have their problems with audience numbers, too; there was a flap not long about circulation fraud by the CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, NEWSDAY, and several other major newspapers, and the Audit Bureau of Circulation has loosened its rules so that newspaper giveaways count as "paid circulation" if an advertising sponsor has paid for the giveaways.)
I don't put a ton of stock in Alexa for accuracy, but being able to show competitive ranking to prospective sdvertisers sure seems to make a difference in getting a buying decision. I wasn't paying much attention for a while last year and my traffic slid, and my Alexa rank slid into the 80,000s and my direct ad revenue took a pounding.
Now that I'm back in the 30,000s on Alexa and my ad revenue is back up too.
Guess I better keep on my toes this year :)
