Forum Moderators: martinibuster
The first site gets around 80 - 100k impressions per day, and usually accounts for about 90% of the daily earnings, mostly I guess due to the higher paying ads (finance site). The other site however, has recently started getting much better traffic, due to events in the media, linking, etc... Yesterday, it reached an all time high of 80k impressions - on par with our main site. As expected, the earnings were still much lower, as the topic area isn't as high paying, and generated just $90 - which is still double its usual earnings. However, the main site's earnings seemed to drop, and the total earnings at the end of the day was about average - hardly any different to any other day. The main site's hits were good - a mid to high traffic day, so it wasn't as if it was having a bad day...
Is it possible that Google has an estimated value per account per day, and it takes a certain amount of traffic to break through that? I've noticed this sort of thing before, but yesterdays data really made me sit up and think...
Anyone else noticed something like this?
P
Above a certain point, a site may exhaust its maximum share of the Widgets, Inc. or Whatsit.com advertiser budget, causing more also-ran ads to display as a percentage of the total
But this wouldn't explain what the OP reports: that increased traffic and earnings on one site seems to be affecting the earnings on a different site covering a different topic.
I've heard the theory that earnings are "capped" in some way. My historic data goes some way to support the theory. My traffic ramped up fairly steadily, but my earnings seemed to go up in steps about a month apart.
On the other hand, an early bidding error/lesson in Adwords, did achieve a comparatively high level of AdSense earnings immediately (unfortunately nowhere near as high as my AdWords costs :( ) This seems to counter the "earnings cap" theory.
The theory would be a little like a load of balloons, inflated one inside the other, getting smaller and smaller. As the smallest one inflates, the stretch becomes tighter, until suddenly it pops, and then there is a big gap of 'floating' area before it again starts to stretch. I saw something to support this last year - we had a month of increased traffic, and it felt a bit like something went *POP*, and suddenly there was no cap on earnings. The daily earnings varied between $350 and $500, but seemed disproportionatley large for the traffic. The month after, it quietened down, and the earnings settled again around a $200 / $280 figure, and seemed to mirror the traffic prettly closely.
It's only recently that the other site has started to do well, and I realised that there might be some sort of artificial limit on the account. Still, if my theory is correct and our traffic continues, at some point, I'm due another *POP* :-).
It would make sense, as it would protect Google (and advertisers) against sites which manage to 'spike' their traffic, for instance a days worth of DIGG traffic, or a temporary news link from a high-profile site. It might also explain why DIGG traffic never seems to be worth very much!
Yet last week suddenly traffic increased 4 fold and earnings rose to 3 fold, which was also due to the, now corrected, fact that the server slowed down, trapping people on pages and CTR rose 75% I now installed round robin and an extra squid, but it appears mediocre content on a lame server is a way for short term gains, and there was no apparent cap.
Interesting remains though that increased traffic is not linear related to an increase of earnings. The relationship is probably in fact asymptotal.
[edited by: mattg3 at 2:35 am (utc) on Jan. 31, 2007]
What purpose would that serve? Do they want to depress their own earnings? I doubt it. Are you suggesting they are taking a larger cut? Then they are risking you taking your business elsewhere.
I've not experienced this myself. As sites grew, so did earnings. Did they dip here and there? Sure.
