Google ads

December 20, 2005 11:39 AM

Calling all webmasters that display Google ads -- how much do you, in your own experience, make from them? And to put it in context, how busy is your site and what is the essence of it, primarily? (blog, forum, fun DB, static page, etc) I have thought about slipping ads into my websites, but I'm not sure it's worth it just to earn 47 cents.
posted by rolypolyman to computers & internet (17 comments total)

I run a niche blog (approx 15,000 views / month) with a friend. We have google ads. They're pretty well targeted (on topic and of potential interest to our readers), but they make bupkis. We've made the proverbial 47&cent. Actually, closer to $5 this year. That's um, not a lot.
posted by zpousman at 11:44 AM on December 20, 2005

Google pays out, as I assumed that you knew, only when you reach $100 US.
posted by zpousman at 11:44 AM on December 20, 2005

Google gets mad if you tell how much you've made. At the moment, it just about pays for the cat chow. And my site has a Google page rank of seven. Very few people get rich.
posted by words1 at 11:49 AM on December 20, 2005

I make about $200-300 a day on a site that gets about 6K hits a day.
posted by null terminated at 11:49 AM on December 20, 2005

Once upon a time I had a gaming site with 3K hits and $0.50 earnings per day. Obviously null terminated did something right and I did something wrong.
posted by martinrebas at 11:57 AM on December 20, 2005

I should add this is only after Google's introduction of the Firefox referrer program ($1 per firefox download). Before that I was making around $20/day.
posted by null terminated at 11:59 AM on December 20, 2005

As alluded to above, the Adsense Terms and Conditions prohibit talking about anything but gross payments.
posted by smackfu at 12:01 PM on December 20, 2005

As noted, Google would really rather no one gave you numbers.

But, generally: I made the website you get when you feel lucky about "pirate." My pagerank (wtf that is) is 5. The site gets (very) roughly 2800 visitors/day, who see three pages. I put ads on those pages two weeks ago, and while I am not going to quit my day job any time soon, it was definitely worth my time. If you are poor, like me, it is great to pad out your income a little.

Warning: You will no longer be punk rock (if ever you were).
posted by fidelity at 12:11 PM on December 20, 2005

I run a site devoted to a children's author (although I haven't updated it in AGES). It used to average around 25K visitors a month, though this year a movie was made from one of his books and my traffic went over 30K a month. I think I got a check from them every month this year (usually about double the magic payout number). My original goal was just to pay for the site hosting, so it's pretty nice to make a profit for doing nothing!
posted by web-goddess at 12:39 PM on December 20, 2005

Oh, gross payments are okay? Yeah, so I'm getting at least $200 a month on a site I haven't really done anything with in more than a year. I've had thoughts about taking it down but I guess enough people are still using it to keep it up as a resource.
posted by web-goddess at 12:41 PM on December 20, 2005

The Adsense Terms and Conditions stopped prohibiting talking about numbers last March.

A forum I run for Irish music players runs ads to pay for hosting, and I get a cheque monthly. I don't keep close stats on visitors per month, but you can see the size of the forum there, and it sees around a half million impressions a month. That site has the advantage of running some very narrowly-targeted ads (and some graphical ads which show instruments which are pretty much impossible not to click on, like this one), and being the forums associated with the first Google hit for "tinwhistle".

I tried Adsense for Search and it's been dismal, but my associated search only searches the forums, so ads are rarely what people are after there.
posted by mendel at 12:50 PM on December 20, 2005

Something to consider is that the topic that your site deals with can significantly affect your earnings. For example, a site about Vioxx could make hundreds a day on half as much traffic as a site about something less controversial/valuable to lawyers. Advertisers pay varying amounts based on the keywords.

I've also found that the # of pageviews doesn't necessarily correlate with the $.
posted by shoepal at 1:03 PM on December 20, 2005

Two examples...

A site that monitors gas prices: $300-1200USD / month
My pet project (which is still in its infancy and I haven't marketed much): $2.50-$15.00USD / month
posted by Kickstart70 at 4:05 PM on December 20, 2005

Kickstart70:

Your pet project after posting on AskMefi: $300-1200USD / month

:-)
posted by null terminated at 4:10 PM on December 20, 2005

null terminated: Heh, I wish :) I posted it on Projects (soon after Projects was a link at the top of the page) and saw no appreciable blip.

I'm kinda stumped on how to promote it more, actually. With a baby on the way in June I've got no money to pay for advertising. I'm friends with the cartoonist over at UserFriendly.org and he's given me banner space, but that's really done almost nothing as well.
posted by Kickstart70 at 4:16 PM on December 20, 2005

My house renovation blog pulls a few dollars a day. I get one or 5 advert clicks that are probably very targeted. The ads have paid for the hosting and started to pay for tools.

I had the adverts on a neighborhood news blog and the ads displayed were much more generic and there was basically no income at all so I pulled all except the Firefox link (which has done ok, considering).
posted by john m at 5:51 AM on December 21, 2005

i only get about 20-30 hits a day on my site, and get paid pretty much NOTHING. But that's kinda expected given my teeny tiny readership.
posted by echo0720 at 10:59 AM on December 21, 2005