Chad wrote a decent post titled “The 7 Levels of Revenue for Your Blog“.
It’s a decent post. Not perfect, but basically dead on. His main point is that AdSense sucks. It has some good points, like paying out on all international traffic (unlike most ad networks) and being a very easy way for any blogger to make money very early on.
Chad took some flack from folk like Steve Pavlina and Vince Cordic. They both basically said that earning less than $5CPM means you’re doing something wrong.
Steve Pavlina: If your Adsense CPM is below $5, I’d say you probably haven’t optimized it very well. A $1 CPM is extremely weak.
Vince Cordic: If you can’t get a CPM of at least $5-10 with Adsense, your doing something seriously wrong.
Yeah. So, guys, let’s put your money where your mouth is. Actually, let’s put my money where your mouth is.
Get our AdSense eCPM across the network to 5-10eCPM and I’ll send you a cheque for $10,000 (US). Easy as pie, eh? I mean it must be easy if y’all can throw around figures like 10CPM. 10CPM per unit on a network our size would net us something like 400K/month in revenue. Just from AdSense. So I’d love to see it, and am more than willing to be proven wrong on Chad’s point that most folk get about a buck, and that’s with a fair amount of work.
See here’s the thing. I’ve been at this for awhile, and know most of the high-end AdSense guys personally. I have a good relationship with the AdSense team, and b5media makes a decent amount of money from AdSense. But I still hate it.
So let’s see if it’s just my hate that’s getting in the way of common sense, or if it’s something else.
Here are a list of 5 sites doing more than half a million pages a month in traffic (so smaller numbers don’t skew things):
The sites combined are currently averaging about 30c CPM per unit, on about 100K impressions a day (we’ve been phasing AdSense out pretty aggressively of late).
If you’re interested in the 10K prize, simply send me a list of changes. I’ll blog them (so others know ahead of time what’s being done). Take a screenshot before and after, and post the percentage change (I’ll also find someone external to serve as an independent judge to confirm results, so we can’t, y’know, lie).
If you’re able to increase the per-unit eCPM by a given amount, I’ll give you a given prize (each prize can only be claimed once):
- 1st prize: Average eCPM $5 - 10K
- 2nd prize: Average eCPM $4 - 3K
- 3rd prize: Average eCPM $3 - $2000 in ads across the b5media blog network
As always, there are some restrictions (these are off the top of my head and may change as folk try and get sneaky). These restrictions basically boil down to 1 point: our content is king, and we refuse to do anything that’s going to ruin our user experience. You can feel free to do whatever you want on your site, but for us a subscriber or return user who truly values our content is way more important than a $1 click.
A list of these, off the top of my head:
- Nothing in the posts themselves. Period. It converts stupidly well for AdSense specifically because it tricks users. Tricking users means sending them away. They’ll never come back. That’s bad for business.
- Nothing black-hat or that’s been specifically frowned on by Google. This would include images beside ads, making ads blend into content more than they’re supposed to, etc.
- No more than the standard number of units per page. Including hidden units and so forth (you’d think this would fall under the above but as I said, I’ve been at this for awhile and heard the whole “if only you’d do this one thing that isn’t technically cool by Google you could double your earnings”).
That’s the short list.
Is it fair? Maybe not. But the number of times AdSense “guru’s” have told us we could double or triple our revenues only to find that their advice amounts to “start high-paying blogs, dump them full of useless search engine content, create false pages, trick users and mix ads into your content” is appalling.
As I said, if you want to push your readers away, that’s fine. But for me, as a blogger, and for us, as a blog network… Readers are important to us. Every single one. It does me no good at all to engage in tactics which earn us tonnes of money the first month, but slow our growth, demotivate our bloggers and turn us from a very real content company into nothing more than a glorified splog network.
So if you have real suggestions that will actually drive up revenue in a sane, legal and cool way that won’t interfere with our users’ experience, bring it on! I’d be more than happy to be proven wrong. I mean, my money’s on the table. It’s waiting. You have live sites with real data, real traffic and what should be an easy means of increasing revenue. I’m not even requiring 5-10CPM to win this. Increase it to the rate we get on some of our graphical remnant ads (nevermind our premium stuff) and I’ll pay you money.
Hell, if you’re that good I’d probably make you a job offer! 
Easy, right? 
Sure it is. Come and take my money if earning massive CPMs on AdSense is so easy!
Kudos Jeremy for for throwing down the gauntlet. I would think it would be difficult to accomplish such high eCPMs without disguising the ads in content or, more generally, spamming the visitor. It will be interesting to see if anyone will agree to the contest and still allow you to blog the “secrets”.
“Nothing in the posts themselves. Period. It converts stupidly well for AdSense specifically because it tricks users. Tricking users means sending them away. They’ll never come back. That’s bad for business. ”
The other two constraints are certainly reasonable, but the one above isn’t. I can certainly see why Adsense wasn’t working for you.
Given the above constraint, this is the challenge I’m actually hearing: “I’ll offer you $10K to optimize my Adsense layout as long as you agree not to succeed. Deep down I don’t want my visitors clicking on ads, since I’m afraid they won’t come back.”
Your fear about tricking users is just that — fear. It doesn’t have much basis in reality IMO. Adsense ads are hyperlinks with descriptions. If people want to click on them instead of reading your content, let them. If the ads are more interesting than your content, then someone is either going to click an ad or click the back button. I figure it’s better to get paid when this happens.
Legitimate ads are offers, not tricks. If you think an advertiser is doing something deceptive, ban that advertiser. I’ve had to ban a few advertisers now and then. But if you think advertising in general is trickery and that it will send people away, never to return, then you should reconsider putting ads on your site at all. I certainly wouldn’t want to advertise on a site with that kind of attitude towards its advertisers.
My attitude is that the advertisers fill a need I’m not filling. They inform my visitors about tons of products and services that may be of interest to them. Given that hundreds of people click on those ads each day, there’s clearly some interest. I’ve often clicked on Adsense ads on other sites when they interested me. I never felt like I was being tricked. Again, ads are just hyperlinks.
I have a number of advertisers using site-targeting specifically for those in-content ads. There’s high demand for prime exposure. When advertisers see that you’re hiding your ads too much, they’ll look elsewhere.
I think you need to work through your mixed feelings about advertising first, especially in-content advertising. Unfortunately no one can help you optimize much if you’re going to harbor fears that would likely cripple your results. My optimization strategy is to test everything, especially my own assumptions. You’re holding an assumption, but are you willing to actually test it?
FYI I currently earn about $9K/month from Adsense, and my one-day Adsense record is $732. But my biggest income source is actually joint-venture deals (basically a more complicated version of affiliate sales). That approach could probably work for your business model as well.
In an average week I post about 3-4 new blog entries, so it doesn’t take a huge posting volume to maintain those results.
I’ll give you one free optimization tip: Posting too frequently (more than once a day) will almost certainly hurt your CPM. Why? Because it takes a while for Adsense to self-optimize on each new page, and if you’re constantly changing the content on your highest traffic pages (like your blog’s home page), you’ll always be showing suboptimal ads on those pages. Even though you may get a lot of search traffic to your archives, you can generate a lot of income from ad clicks on your blog’s home page, but only if those ads are well-optimized.
Just in case it wasn’t obvious, I must decline your challenge as it’s currently formulated, but if your attitude towards advertising changes and you become genuinely committed to optimizing results, feel free to drop me a line.
Btw doesn’t B5 Media have outside investors that you’re accountable to? I’d think they’d be encouraging you to optimize for results and test any assumptions that might be holding you back. $400K/month sounds like a pretty good reason to test them right away.
Steve,
Thanks for the (as always) insightful commentary.
For the record, I have no fear of ads whatsoever. b5media currently does about an order of magnitude in advertising revenue compared to your AdSense revenue (and we make more in AdSense).
Again, I have no fear of ads.
What I do have is a sense of value for our readers, our community and the experience they have when they come to our sites. End of the day, we’re a content company. We live and die not by how much we get on the first visit (ie: drive-by traffic) but on how much we get over the life of a user’s interaction with us.
So let’s just drop the “afraid of ads” stuff, shall we? It’s a straw man and you’re better than that.
End of the day, it’s far better for me to earn a penny here and a penny there for a year or more of a user’s life with us than it is for me to earn 50c-1$ on the only visit they’ll ever have.
As a result, overall experience, ease of identifying and reading the content, stickiness and lack of confusion are key.
For the record, an ad that looks exactly like the content around it with no border, the same color text and similar spacing (adjusting spacing to match AdSense ads being one of the easy ways to increase CTR) are all about tricking the user. Put the ad right at the top of the content. Put it right in the content. Make it look just like the content.
So what happens? The user interacts with it just like it’s content.
In terms of advertiser value, I’d be more than happy to go there. To me, an ad that actually builds brand value, that leads the reader to click on something because they’re genuinely interested in it and know that it’s an ad is what drives real value. A properly measured and metriced campaign is a thing of beauty.
While you see my gauntlet as dooming you to failure, that’s exactly how I feel about advice from AdSense “geniuses” like you.
You’re basically saying:
“Yeah, you can make a LOT of money with AdSense, but only if you devalue your content, devalue your readers and structure your page entirely around getting people’s eyes and mice hyper focussed on the ads… which then dooms your content business to failure”.
Sorry Steve, but ads are meant to be the value-add, not the core point of a page. Any strategy which requires me to make the ads so integrated that they’re indistinguishable from the content will destroy the content side of our company.
I will always, and every time, pick our readers above advertisers. And, not only do our VC’s value this, they know from experience that it’s the path to take.
After all, being ultra aggressive on ads is one thing when you’re an individual with a few thousand readers, but no media company survives by ruining the reader experience.
So yeah, AdSense sucks if the only way to make money is to turn your blog into a NASCAR vehicle. As a blogger, as a reader and as a media guy consistent and positive reader experience is the key to solid and sustained growth.
Also, Steve, by my math, your site says you have 1.8M uniques/month. If you’re making 9K/month that means a few interesting things:
1. Only just barely 5CPM
2. And that’s only if no visitor EVER comes back
Industry average for blogs is about 2 visits per unique and about 2 pageviews per visit. If you had 1.8M uniques (not saying you don’t), you should be driving 7.2M pageviews/month. And with that traffic, you could *easily* earn 28-30K doing ads the way we do them.
So if the way to earn 10CPM is to cannibalize your traffic and never have repeat visitors, then yeah my VC’s are cool with our path
Also, let’s be clear. If 5$ CPM was easy, FaceBook would pay anyone a BILLION dollars to help them do it. After all, it’d generate them in excess of 7.5 MILLION dollars a DAY in revenue!
My 10K is a pittance compared to what other companies would pay for the secrets on how to sustain 5$ CPM’s
Jeremy,
I’ve expressed my opionin on this matter via email and on my blog, but I do want to say one thing..
The nature of your visitors, their demographics, and the type of site you have plays a big role in Adsense (or other ad) earnings.
A site like Facebook should not even begin to be compared to a marketing or self improvement blog for example. Facebook visitors are a whole different breed and the ad revenue reflects that.
Vince, yeah I got your email and will post it tomorrow with my thoughts (per your permission). It’s a great email and makes some really good points.
Also, I totally agree that some traffic converts way better than others. Our Science & Health blogs, for example, often do CPM’s of 10-40$.
My impatience is with AdSense guys who say “if you aren’t earning 5$ CPM’s you’re doing something wrong”. Which is just flat out false if you need to quantify it with something like “unless you’re doing lots of traffic or your audience is really general or, or, or…”
Also, my biggest bone to pick in all of this may have been missed, and it’s a huge issue I have with Google’s reporting.
The eCPM reported on the default Advanced Reports screen in AdSense is not calculating CPM. It’s calculating RPM!!!
RPM is a measure of the total advertising dollars generated by 1000 pageviews (by real people).
That is what the default view is showing. CPM is a per unit calculation. Period. Showing revenue for all units as a single CPM is entirely misleading.
If you’re doing 5eCPM in AdSense across 3 full size units, one LinkAds unit and your search, you’re actually doing 1CPM per unit.
It pisses me off so much, because bloggers are being mislead by Google that they’re getting these great CPM’s when they’re really, really, really not. Some bloggers are earning 2-2.50$ eCPM’s on the main report and think they shouldn’t go with something like ContextWeb at 1$… When ContextWeb at 1$ would pay them 3-4$ for the same traffic.
Google is falsely locking bloggers in by feeding them blatantly false information, and it needs to stop.
Sure I’d love it if someone could actually show off 10$CPM’s in AdSense for all traffic. I just don’t think it’ll happen. And, yeah, part of the reason is folk who promote the hell out of AdSense earnings without caveats (when there should be some). But the larger issue is Google basically lying to bloggers and other publishers.
Is AdSense useful? Hell yeah. It’s fantastic in some cases. But there are so, so many issues with AdSense it’s not even funny. And they are issues that Google and the general AdSense community need to address in order to not *hurt* themselves long term.
Jeremy,
I understand the difference between RPM and CPM, but when dealing with Adsense there is no such thing as RPM.
So it comes down to this..
What is the total amount of money I make with *all* the Adsense units on the page per 1000 visitors, and what is the total amount of money I make with *all* the CPM based graphic/banner ads on one page.
So with Adsense you may have 3 units total on one page with a CPM/RPM of $5. On the other hand, you may have 3 banners/graphic ads making a total CPM/RPM of $5.
I’m not saying one makes more than the other, in fact they usually do best in combination. I’m just pointing out that the terminology is flawed as you said, but it does still apply.
Oh, yuk, Jeremy, I butchered my spelling:
You can delete this comment and the previous one. I’ll correct my spelling in a second comment. (too reliant on the preview button)
FWIW, changing the ad colors, moving the ad around, or even making the ad float might squeeze some dollars out of the ad space. In tune with your guidelines, it’s unlikely that there is room for these changes to be substantial enough to boost the CPM by much.
Google ad section targeting could be more helpful; it doesn’t interfere with the users at all. However you will need to know your visitors and emphasis some bits of text in the blog applicable to that.
You might want to check out keyword prices and see who’s buying ad space in your target niche and see if you have any corresponding blog topics which you can write about. (If interpreted wrong, this one can iffy on the spammy side, so use it smartly with common sense)
Do you enable image ads or video ads? IIRC, these ads can still be unobtrusive. But you will need to test to see.
Allow advertisers to advertise directly on your site through google. Small time advertisers who may not have the ad spend to contact you for the big-spends, can really improve your eCPM in your ad unit because of increased competition for your space. Perhaps making that link visible to the small advertisers? (this is a slow gradual process).
Acquire people who aren’t immune to ads. Advertise the blog through adwords and track everything. You are trying to gain readership of people who are likely to follow ads (in contrast to people who hate ads). Ensure (by tracking) that your acquisition costs and click fraud aren’t hindering your conversion cost and then follow the increase in adsense earnings. It might not be positive, so only test this for a short time.
You might be interested in trying those above techniques to differing degrees of aggressiveness with existing and new blogs. Hey, you know it might be possible to sustain readership on certain blogs which push the envelope on the ads. Some people eat them up!
Jeremy email me and I’ll send you my address for the check. lol
It’s interesting that you define your enterprise as a content business. I prefer to think of mine as a service business, but I can see why you’d make that choice.
FWIW I’m planning to move away from the ad model over the next 2 years, since I too believe it’s not the best way to monetize a site. Currently my site earns about $40K/month from about 600 articles of content, so to me the more important factor than the CPM is the income per article. It’s largely irrelevant how many page views I get because there’s virtually no incremental cost for another million page views. But it takes time to write a quality article, so I want to make sure that time is well spent. I really don’t want to move towards the model of becoming a low-quality content factory, since that isn’t going to serve my visitors.
You’re right that the content is ultimately what generates the long-term income. But the idea that lots of ads will cause visitors to flee en masse just isn’t consistent with my experience. I could find no correlation whatsoever between the volume of ads on the site and traffic growth. The ad density may seem like it should be a major factor in traffic growth and quality of service, but it just didn’t seem to have any impact whatsoever. So again, I’d recommend against jumping to conclusions here unless you actually test them directly. You may be surprised.
My current blog is relatively new, and therefore I’m waiting a month or two before I even think about placing ads. But for a long time I’ve placed a serious doubt over Adsense.
The amount you get paid for the average click is robbery. Plus, more and more people are litterally blind to them. In fact, I’m not sure how people make money with adsense. It doesn’t matter how much one hides them in the content, I just don’t see them. Am I the only one?
Hey guys, good stuff. Definitely lots of valuable thoughts here, and it’s great to see everyone contributing without getting caught up in too many insubstantials
We could probably talk around the small points of this all night long. I actually think a podcast would be very interesting to talk this over. Steve, Vince, you game? Hell, I’m speaking at a panel at SES on this on the content side, while Chad’s taking one on the ad side. Should be … interesting
I’m going to leave all of the stuff about our business, about our psychological “issues” etc completely aside. Mainly because they miss the point completely. In pure business terms, we have suppliers (bloggers), customers (advertisers) and consumers (readers). We need to keep all 3 groups incredibly happy in order to truly succeed and grow.
We feel we’re striking that balance by creating blogs our bloggers can be proud of, content readers can find and enjoy without interruption and valuable ad products for our advertisers.
Could we make more money by adding more intrusive units? Sure. And TV networks could make more money by doubling the number of ads in commercial breaks. But people would leave. Guaranteed. Less ads, less intrusive ads and more valuable ads is where the industry is going. Not just online, in every advertising segment. TV. Radio. Movies. Print. Everywhere.
Steve, as a quick thought, if you had our averages (2.5 pageviews/visit, 2.5 visits/unique) you’d have 11.5M pageviews. If you could hit 5RPM with that, you’d generate 56.25K just in display ads
Ultimately, a few quick points:
1. Google’s CPM isn’t CPM. When we say we want 5CPM, it’s because we want 5CPM. If you guys don’t mean Page eCPM, then say Page eCPM.
2. When faced with a choice between reader experience and advertising interference, we’ll always choose our readers. And that gives us very, very healthy growth.
3. While my restrictions might be setup to make AdSense folk fail (they aren’t, for the record), saying that the only way to earn 5CPM per unit with AdSense is to ruin the user experience likewise sets up content businesses for failure.
The point of the challenge was simple. If 5$CPM’s per unit are possible with AdSense in such a way that we can balance readers’ needs, bloggers’ needs and advertisers’ needs, then I’m willing to pay very real money for that.
That’s not unreasonable. All I’m asking is what’s asked of me every day. If it isn’t possible, fine. But if it isn’t possible, then statements like “if you can’t hit 5CPM you’re doing something wrong” deserve to be retracted
But if it is possible, then it’s easy money!
Steve,
I’m confused with this part of your comment:
“It’s largely irrelevant how many page views I get because there’s virtually no incremental cost for another million page views.”
If you are doing your advertising program correctly, then more page views = more revenue.
If you’re on a 5CPM with 5 units a page, one million more page views is $25,000 in monthly revenue.
And just for final clarification on what a CPM cost is.
It ‘IS’ the cost of ONE ad unit displayed 1000 times.
Traffic is certainly important, but my business model is such that visitors are far more important than page views. Most of my income comes from JV deals, not CPM ads.
What kind of CTR do you have to generate $5 eCPMs?
At $0.10/click, you would need 50 clicks per 1000 impressions… a whopping 5% CTR. DoubleClick has published the average CTR to be 0.10%. Unless you specifically target high-value keywords, the $/click won’t go up either.
What am I missing?
Interesting, $5 is dream for me. Mine is $0.5 on average.
A decent post Jeremy, but you are wrong about few things.
But first of all let me state, I am not a fan of Adsense, but I still think its one of the best bets for the small and independent publishers. Though once you get big in terms of traffic you get many more attractive options than Adsense.
Now other thing is if you are getting 30c eCPM for you ads, it means you traffic is not of high quality. You must be getting most of your traffic from images.google.com or like, where most of the people are only interested in images and not content. Since your top 5 sites are all about celebrities/TV gossips which don`t convert well, so I am not surprised for such a poor eCPM. Your best bet is banner ads. I would have been surprised if your gadgets/lifestyle sites doing less than $2eCPM (ad unit).
One more thing I don`t agree with you is about Adsense Customer support, we have a dedicated Adsense Account manager which has helped us by tweaking small things to raise our earning by a good margin.
I’ll agree to Ankit, Adsense is not always the best best. I operate a product review website, and I use chitika, the average cpc is 3 times adsense was paying me. But it will only work if you have chitika eminimalls on product related website.
I think the debate above has probably been the most enlightening look at Adsense’s pros and cons I’ve seen in a while. Anyways, I’m not joining the debate, I’m here to make me 10k (or profit share on the 400 ;)) :D.
So…
1) A little research into keywords doesn’t hurt. Like you mentioned, the topic is key. But it’s the topic of the page first, and the overall blog topic second. My politics blog has some NAFTA content that got me higher paying clicks (before I removed Adsense because I felt it was too sneaky in general, which bothered me) because it was kind of economic/financial research. If I’d bothered figuring out the keywords triggering those clicks, I could have probably made more.
To make a long story short, do some content network ads on AdWords, figure out which keywords and ad inventory are generating higher CPC and write around those (at least partly).
As a bonus, you’ll have content that can pull search traffic on popular keywords and increase your Ms (the M from CPM…). MHMmmm…
2) Look for patterns of untargeted/poorly targeted ads on your network, blog by blog. Contact your current advertisers and mention that inventory (i.e. site targeted ads). The more advertisers you get interested, the higher your clicks will pay. Besides, I’ll bet you get a higher CTR when readers see the 125×125 graphical ad and the adsense ad from the same company. To make a long story short, get the word out that you have cheap inventory and on what keywords. Advertisers will follow.
Now the question is if you’ll put in the work to make 400k/mo … ?
Regards,
Gabriel “looking to advertise on Ensight Adsense in the near future” Goldenberg
well, some users eCPM used to be above 5$, but with high traffic websites this is not the case.
# one thing is quite true; if your website get high search traffic, your eCPM will be higher than the site who’s search traffic is lower. Second, If your website traffic increases suddenly due to a link on high traffic site like digg or stumble upon…your eCPM will DROP Marjory!
For last five months My Google eCPM was hitting rock bottom,……its more than frustrating…..But I am not changing corners and will be sticking with Google adsense…..Believe me, its still the Best!!
I am ready to accept the words of jeremy. And i also wonder those 5 sites doing more than half a million page traffic. Is there any simple way to bring up my site like that.
I see a lot of chest beating, no one committing to help increase anyone’s CPM.
Anyone got any decent CPM from directories?
I have one site that makes 10 ecpm. I have set up my other site the same way and have almost no revenue at all. I think it comes down to the folks who visit the site. What is their desired outcome. On my one site. Folks are looking for quick information and possibly a product. On my other site, folks come to read content. I have done my best to get the same rates of return on all my sites. I have never been able to get my political pundit readers on my political site to make me money. All of my revenue comes from a Nascar site. If you can beleive this, NASCAR is paying my Political sites bills.
This is a wonderful read! I really felt like at one point there were two or three people standing behind me having a real good go at each other!!
Anyway - if you don’t want to annoy your readers by having adsense in the content of the post, then why not consider having them appear in the post itself after a week or 10 days or something. That way you’ll only be serving the adsense ads to people who find you through search engines - they are much more likely to click on them anyway.
Your loyal readers will get their feed, email notification or just stop by every week or two without having the ads in the post whereas your joe (or joanne) blogs who comes from google on some random query will happily find what they are looking for or will leave on a link that you get paid for… everyone is happy!
It works for me and my blog that gets around 1400 unique visitors a month (yes I’m working on that!) produces an average CPM of $13.00.
I appreciate that it’s about the type of person who visits and their demographic and the fact that if you get a random stumble or digg your CPM drops through the floor, but surely something like this could help in your quest to up your CPM?
I use a plug in for this very thing:
http://www.whydowork.com/blog/whydowork-adsense-plugin/
I look forward to reading more of this lovely argument/post!
setting up a blog or webpage depends on what your aim is.
content is king and get a decent amount of revenue, not much, but no trickery.
or
black hat if want to make money out of adsense like $5 a day (but where’s the proof?).