gHacks technology news » revenue

The Rubicon Project

Martin — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 18:59:11 +0000

The Rubicon Project is yet another service like Pubmatic that tries to optimize your ad inventory on your website. They do this by testing different kinds of ads from different advertising companies in the ad spots on your website which has the result that ads generating maximum profits are displayed after a while.

There are however several differences between the Rubicon Project and Pubmatic which are worth noting. When I first joined Pubmatic I was turned off by the fact that I had to add my username and password for all the advertising companies that I did work with and that I had to sign up for all that I was not a member of yet.

This required a huge portion of trust on my side which I was not able to give at that time. I did not want to give away my login details which basically could be used to change account details like payment address. I therefor never tried out Pubmatic.

The Rubicon Project does not have this requirement. They use existing accounts for sites that generate less than 300000 impressions per day. This has several advantages. First, I do not have to give them my existing login information which is great. Second I do get paid by Paypal or Check from one company and not from several. I also see all the stats and performance in one place instead of having to log into several websites to check the performance of my ads.

Third, I do not have to join networks that I’m no member of yet and finally I can use advertisers that are not available yet in my country. This means that it is for instance possible to have YPN (Yahoo Ads) displayed on your website even if you do not have a US-American SSID. That’s the theory at least because I can currently select only a handful of networks from the list of advertising networks listed on their website.

A quick chat with the excellent support revealed that the Network Directory contained most known advertising networks and that users could comment and rate them even if they have not been added yet to the Rubicon Project. Plans are to add as many advertisers from that list before the commercial release in 2008.

I’m currently using ads from their website to fill as second tier for certain ad spots on my website and will report back when I have some data that I can share. Here is a short list of changes that I would like to see:

Create Ad Zones and disable certain networks on those zones. Currently a network can only be disabled for all ad spots.
Faster reporting times. They are updated once a day only but they will most likely fix this before they leave Beta
More Advertisers. Some heavyweight advertisers are missing currently. Those are YPN, Tribalfusion, Burst Media and others that I use on my website currently
Make it clearer that users have to select ad colors themselves and make it possible to use different colors for different ad zones.

I heard about the Rubicon Project at Connected Internet. Make sure you check this awesome blog out and add it to your RSS Reader.

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Breakdown of Blog Earnings

Martin — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 00:34:16 +0000

Once in a while I do post about my blog earnings on this blog. I still do not like to post exact figures although it would give me some credibility with the blog community who seem to put those into higher regard that earn a lot of money with their blogs. Still, you would not tell someone you hardly knew how much you’d earn in your job either, would not you ?

This post describes the progress of monetizing Ghacks and will hopefully encourage others and probably give at least some readers new ideas on what they could do to monetize their blog or website.

I’m basically using three monetization concepts here at Ghacks. The first is Pay Per Click which makes up the majority of my earnings, then there is Pay Per Impression and last but not least we have Affiliate Sales.

Pay Per Click

I’m using Google Adsense which has been my major source of income for a very long time side by side with Vibrant Medias Intellitxt service. Google Adsense was on a decline ever since Google changed the clickable area of their ads while Intellitxt is on a huge rise. It gets even better, Vibrant Media pays in Euro, one of the few advertising companies that do. This is very helpful and a good counterweight to the decreasing value of the Dollar in the world. Both make up roughly 80% of my blogs earnings.

Pay Per Impression

This is something that I’m exploring lately and I had good results with Tribalfusion. They make up roughly 10% of my blogs earnings which is ok for impression based services. I read about chaining just lately and signed up for Burst Media and Vizi as well to chain advertisements.

Let me explain what that means. The companies are not able to fill out all of your inventory with ads. Good companies fill 50%+ of the inventory with ads and display default ads (or none) if they can’t fill the ad spot with an ad.

Instead of displaying none paying default ads or no ads webmasters began to chain services and put them into tiers. So, if Tribalfusion can’t serve the ad they send the request to Burst who fill the ad or, if they cannot, send it to Vizi to fill the ad.

This makes it possible to create a higher fill rate for your ad inventory and earn money in the process.

Direct Advertisement is normally impression based as well and this is an area where I really have to do more. I made a contact with the nice guys of Ciao who ordered an ad placement for six months but this is just a tiny deal, nothing big. The deal was made after I contacted them asking if they wanted to advertise on my website.

My plans are to create a list of possible advertisers first and write 2-3 emails each day. I don’t have that much experience in writing sales letters but I will learn that as well I think.

Affiliate Earnings

This is not really working for my blog. Earnings are neglectable except for the earnings of the Giganews affiliate program which is earning a good amount of money if you consider that I mention it only in a few posts on my site.

To Do:

Direct Advertisement is the key to go. I’m at a cap with all advertisements on my site and only new traffic sources would raise the amount of money that I earn from this website. (I’m currently testing something that will drive more traffic to my blog, I will probably write about it if it is indeed successful).

The big advantage of Direct Advertisement is that the webmaster keeps all the money. There is no third party that gets a piece of the cake. It’s more work though and pretty hard to convince companies to advertise on a website directly.

Looking For:

I’m looking for someone who has experience in making direct advertisement deals with companies. A few friends of mine would join the party with their successful blogs as well and you would earn a percentage of every direct advertisement deal that you make.

Tags: ghacks, monetize, revenue

Google Adsense Revenue and Traffic Comparision

Martin — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 13:14:59 +0000

I’m using Google Adsense for more than two years to monetize Ghacks and experienced some ups and downs. I thought it would be nice to create a graph that would put Adsense revenue in relation to the traffic that my website received. This could give courage to those webmasters who are currently struggling with their Adsense revenue especially when it dropped suddenly while the traffic remained more or less on the same level.

The red bar is showing my Adsense earnings (excluding Adsense for search and Adsense Referrals) from October 2005 to October 2007, the blue bar showing the traffic that my blog received in that time (the impressions counted by Google to be precise). For the sake of getting those values on the same chart I decided to divide my traffic by 10, just imagine it would be somewhere outside that graph..

The interesting part is of course what we can learn from that graph. Here are my conclusions after looking at that graph.

I did not start optimizing Adsense (position and layout) until May 06, that explains the first huge upswing in earnings.
The rise in December 05 was due to several of my articles making it on the Digg frontpage.
The big drops in revenue can not be explained with decreasing traffic. I’m not sure what caused the drops, I did change to my new theme in August which might have something to do with the drop. Not sure about the cause in April though.
The traffic increase can be mainly attributed to increasing the post frequency from three to four / five posts per day.

Did you experience similar increases and drops since monetizing your blog with Google Adsense ? I used to panic a lot when I recognized huge drops in earnings but looking at this graph once again shows me that it does not make sense to panic. If traffic remains steady the revenue drop can more likely be attributed to holidays and advertisers stopping campaigns.

Tags: blog, google adsense, impressions, revenue, webmaster, website

A second look at TNX

Martin — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 09:03:45 +0000

I recently discovered TNX which is a web service similar to Text Link Ads. TNX is a link broker selling links on every single page of your website or blog if their script is installed on those sites. Users get paid in points for links which can be anywhere from 1 point to a several thousand depending on the Pagerank and the backlinks of the website the links are placed on.

Points can be in turn used to buy links for your websites or cashed out. The current exchange rate is $0.63 for 1000 points. PR4 pages at Ghacks generate 3750 points which equals roughly $2.36 per month for that page. A PR5 page would earn double that amount per month.

If you compare the prices to Text Link Ads you see that you could earn more money from TNX especially if you take into consideration that up to 4 links can be played on every page of your website.

I have currently earned 75000 points with Ghacks which is about $50. It takes some time until links have been placed on all pages. I currently have links on about 40 pages which is not much. I do delete all links on PR0 pages because this earns me just 7.5 points which is next to nothing in my opinion. 1000 Links on PR0 pages would earn me $5 which is ridiculous. So, all PR0 links get deleted.

My estimation is that I could earn about $300 per month from playing one link on every page that has a Pagerank greater than 0 or $1200 if I go for the overkill and place four links on each page.

Points can also be sold in webmaster forums and in the forum at TNX which unfortunately has no activity at all at the moment. I suppose you could try and sell points at forums like Digitalpoint or Namepros instead for a better conversion rate than $0.63 because webmasters buying links do pay $1.2 for 1000 points at the moment.

Read More:

TNX

Tags: blog revenue, revenue, sell links, text-link-ads, tnx

Which Adsense Ads and Locations work best on my blog ?

Martin — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 16:22:18 +0000

If you ask ten webmasters about the best Adsense unit that is offered at the moment, the best color scheme for that unit and best location you would get ten different answers. There is no absolute truth, no way to setup Adsense that will earn you the most. It depends on so many factors that it is difficulty to give general tips.

There are some and they can be applied to most websites and those websites will earn good money from those tips but they are probably not the ultimate way either. Most tips will tell you the following:

Use the large or medium rectangle and / or the wide skyscraper for best results.
Blend the ads
Add them as close as possible to your content

If you apply the ads this way you will get good results. A click through rate between 2-5% for instance but you never know for sure if this is indeed the best ad unit for your website.

It is also important to note that the best paying ad unit might not be one that you want to put up on your blog because it might turn visitors away from your site. Back to the topic, how would you find out which Adsense ads work best for your blog ?

The obvious answer is of course to try them all out and come to a conclusion afterwards. The not so obvious way is what I’m going to explain now. I would suggest that you try this out if your blog reaches at least 1000 page impressions per day, the more the better of course. It does not make much sense to try out different ad units and positions if your blog gets 50 visitors per day because this does not lead to data that you can rely on.

Wordpress Plugin:

A great way to test out different ad units, location and appearance is to use the excellent Wordpress plugin Adsense Paster if you happen to use Wordpress.

Adsense paster rotates ad units that you create in text files randomly which means that you can test several units without having to alter the code by hand.

General Method:

The following method has been found at the digital alchemy blog and can be used to test several ad units.

Factors:

Some factors that you should consider are:

Ad unit size. Test out different sizes such as large and medium rectangle, half banner, full banner, the squares and so on
Ad appearance. Blend units, make them stick out, use borders, don't use borders, alter link color, ad text, url color..
Ad location. Let it float on the top left spot of your articles, on the top right spot, alone on top and the article below, at the bottom..
Ad a second ad unit and see if it impacts revenue

Channels:

You have to setup channels to be able to track earnings. Every ad unit should get an own channel. Make sure you track the performance for several days - workdays are best for most sites - and remove ads that do not perform that well from your site.

Section Targeting:

Make sure you use Section Targeting which emphasizes certain parts of your website. You need to edit the source code of your blog and add the following code from google to it. You can add that code in single.php, index.php and page.php before and after the function that displays your blog post. It would look like the following in single.php





...

...

...


..

..

..

You can also deemphasize parts of your blog by using google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) instead of google_ad_section_start which is useful to deemphasize the sidebar for instance.

Tags: ad units, Adsense, best performing adsense units, Google, revenue, webmasters

gHacks technology news » revenue

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