Time for the annual poll: How did '07 treat you?

[Sootah]

Fairly well for me, a record year; although this isn't saying much. For most of '07 I didn't work on my websites at all as I have been dealing with certification in my day job. (Got the Series 7, 63, CEP I and II)

All in all I pulled in 5 digits, which isn't too shabby. AdSense more than made all of my car payments this year, and I have a fairly nice ride.

My goal for 2008 is $20k, so we'll see how I do there.

How was '07 for you? What are your goals for '08?

[fearlessrick]

AdSense down.

Graphical ads up.

Selling my own links and text ads, way up.

Guess which way I'm going in 2008.

[IanCP]

CTR steady, traffic down a little on 06 and revenue from Adsense halved

Logically your EPC has dropped at least 50% which isn't my experience.

Traffic down a touch which isn't surprising since I've not written anything original in nearly eight years.

EPC is up around 10+% but CTR is down around 50+% which I now firmly put down to changes in "clickable area".

I believe other factors come into play in the "smart pricing" arena and I'm fast being converted to the theory that giving AdSense an inside look at our sites performance via Analytics was the dumbest move any of us made.

There will be exceptions of course.

[dailypress]

I have done fairly well but still havent reached my goal of $10k/year. Im looking forward for a much better year!

[FattyB]

Ian,

Our ads were pretty prominent top left of articles so the October change did not really effect our CTR. But for sure our overall revenue is down. Used to be I thought a bad day if below $800 per day on Adsense and now lucky to push 250 on about 80-90% of traffic.

I should say the change happened just before the clickable change, about 2 weeks or so I think. Very sudden but nothing to do with CTR.

One positive is that is appears to have been the only thing to stop our Adsense rep sending through daft ideas. Now they don't bother replying. As I have said elsewhere fair weather friends.

Still as another poster said changes like this do make you look at things in detail. I switched an end of article slot to a non-Adsense solution and it makes a good bit more than Adsense was. Not major but interesting and would not have noticed had Adsense not had a sudden drop.

[edited by: FattyB at 8:41 pm (utc) on Jan. 3, 2008]

[Edge]

Business has never been better, All revenue streams have improved except AdSense....

[freaky]

Best Year so far for me. :-)

[dataguy]

Started the year with a site under the -950 penalty, which was lifted in April. Overall income was down 2% for the year... so I'm not complaining.

Biggest disapointments have been in the sites that we've developed in order to 'diversify'.

We still have all our eggs in one basket and at times it's a struggle to know if our efforts would be better spent on improving the one basket instead of working on other baskets which may or may not hold any eggs down the road.

Hopefully we'll see some improvements with the new sites in 2008.