Forum Moderators: martinibuster
My traffic graphs and pretty much every other metric I use to measure results with says that May is another successful month, it's the who knows how many months in a row i've increased total traffic/unique visitors/search rankings.
Sales are up, affiliate results are up, total ad revenue is up, I'm happy. My affiliate companies have my sites rated at 4/5 and are happy with me... life is good.
My eCpm graphs and pretty much every other metric I use to measure earnings with says that May is another failure of a month, it's the who knows how many months in a row i've decreased total income per page/pageview/visitor.
Sales profits aren't up, affiliate earnings per sale aren't up, total ad revenue per page isn't up. My affiliate companies have my sites rated well enough to see fit to pay me a little less each month per event... their life is good.
I was playing around with the liquify effect in photoshop on a picture I keep on my desktop when I switched over to the analytics and adsense tabs of my browser, they were still open... and i'm officialy seeing dueling graphs. (if you haven't seen the dueling banjo scene made famous by deliverance, just take my word that there's nothing wrong with my mental capacity, usually, I promise.)
I copied both graphs for the past 12 months into photoshop and it dawned on my that they are IDENTICAL. As traffic has gone up, eCpm has come down EXACTLY THE SAME WAY FOR A YEAR!
I flipped one graph around 180 degrees and inverted it... it's eerie how exactly the same they are. Is this even possible?
I wouldn't trouble you with that question unless it was also partly a rant and partly a vent because I tend to try and answer my own puzzles but it's all of those tonight. The only conclusion I can draw is that the internet in general is deflating, it's getting flat, it's spreading out so thin it takes more and more and more to get the same effect.
I'm beyond thinking this is a Google thing, it's affecting every income source equally, I think we're headed for a black hole of some sort, a nexus perhaps, because the number of pages being created is outstripping the number of converting visitors steadily with no sign of slowing down.
I hope you enjoyed the effort I placed in this post, no your not crazy your eCPM is doing the same as everyone elses, now get back to your bicycle pump and keep pumping out the content. When you take a break I'll pick up the slack, together we can make a bigger internet!
On the bright side, I can generate a major income boost by launching another site or project and spreading my time out even more thinly, but then I wouldn't have time to post here anymore... hmmmm.
[edited by: JS_Harris at 10:49 am (utc) on May 23, 2009]
There is a global recession and has been for quite some time. There is also an ever-increasing number of sites competing for eyeballs and ad revenue. Thus, many if not most publishers are experiencing falling advertising revenue even if their circulation is climbing.
In other words, as someone said at a conference I attended recently, "Flat is the new up."
And so the net gets bigger and bigger and bigger...
On the other hand, we have an exploding amount of material on the internet. I wrote down some figures that I located from 2008. I'm sure they could be updated.
-over 150 million websites.
-over 1 trillion web pages and probably a lot more.
-several billion new web pages on a daily basis.
If you are even holding your own in the present economic environment, you are probably doing just fine.
