Reporting a bit early here, but I felt inspired, and also my new phone has a screen recording function.
Besides the additional of more Travel posts, I have also built out several game wiki pages, notably the Dragon Traveler wiki, and new game guides for offers on FreeCash and Swagbucks.
Things have suddenly improved since my last report in July.
This morning, I received an email saying that my PayPal account had received a payment from Automattic for $106.31. I checked my Ads panel and found that it is the exact amount in my balance.
I had assumed the payouts were manual and needed to be requested. But this assumption was based on posts I have seen in the WordPress Forums. It seems the payments are automatic after reaching the necessary threshold of $100.
My previous post would have covered the periods of April, May, and June. In those months, I received, $10.88, $11.01, and $6.07, respectively. My ads served in April and May averaged 150k, but in June, the numbers dropped, and I only had 70k ads served.
At the time of the drop, my site traffic had not decreased, which left me confused. What noticeably changed was that the CPM had dropped 75%. This may have resulted from increased site traffic from non-US sources, which don’t accrue the same degree of ad revenues.
In July and August, ads served dropped to 23k and 38k. However, my CPM increased from $0.09 in June to $0.27 in July and $0.36 in August.
This increase resulted in revenue of $6.54 in July and an improved $14.18 in August. This last amount was what pushed me over the $100 mark and triggered the payout I received.
My annual goal for the site is $74, which would cover the cost of the upgraded plan and custom domain name for 3 years. The domain was free for the first year.
That’s it for the third quarter report. I wrote more below, but I started reminiscing about sort of unrelated stuff.
In the past, when I would try to research hosting with other providers, I would ask for advice from people who had experience with other services.
I recall previously trying out Hostinger for a different website. I was on the free trial and had selected a basic plan.
Despite all the ads saying how low hosting was, they tried to pre-charge me $660 for a year of hosting before the trial had ended. I had to fight them on the charge before finally getting it removed and closing my account.
I tried a couple of others that were spoken highly of on Reddit, but I had similar experiences. All of this led me to decide that self-hosted sites with .org WordPress are actually more expensive than what WordPress.com offers.
I think the main difference between the platforms is the availability of Plugins on self-hosted sites. With a .com-hosted site, we don’t get plugin access without an upgraded plan, but .org sites get plugin access right out of the gate.
This revelation probably has soured some folks on the platform. I wonder, though, if self-hosted sites are too dependent on plugins? Would they be able to succeed without a crutch?
I see a similar trend with the introduction of AI to web design and other facets of online life.
People may start using it as a helpful aid, but soon enough, they become dependent on it for all of their activities. If the AI is offline or there is a bug, it cripples their ability to function.
It’s the same with plugins; when a bug appears or an exploit, the entire ecosystem is affected because everyone is dependent on these plugins.
The information in this post is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended to be legal advice. While I have tried to ensure that the content is accurate and current, I make no guarantees. You should seek legal or other professional advice before acting or relying on any of the information.
So once again, I am a bit late in reporting the figures. Maybe it’s the ADD speaking, but I find it really easy to forget something I only do 4 times a year.
In my last WordAds Experience post, I reported on the Q3-4 period of 2024. That year, I had upgraded my account to one that supports WordAds and revenue sharing in March of 2024. By December, I had earned $51.77. That’s how much I got for 280,588 Ads Served at a $0.18 CPM.
Now, here we are in 2025, and I have seen a marked increase in site traffic. I did recently have a setback, possibly, but I am working to make up for the loss.
Just last week, my YouTube account was shut down, quite unfortunately. I was disappointed, to say the least, but I was kind of expecting it after all the restrictions my content was generating. Some of these mobile games are more than a little risque. It’s just the nature of the beast.
I took it as a sign and decided to focus on this website alone. It wasn’t exactly a hard decision once I started thinking about my journey overall. After 3 years, the YouTube account wasn’t anywhere near the necessary watch hours for monetization. Even if I did get those hours, the content wasn’t really suitable for advertising revenue.
I have since closed my other social media accounts. It was nice having other sources of incoming traffic, but the effort to keep the other accounts updated meant that I was spending less time here on the site writing up content.
Got a little sidetracked there. For the first quarter (Jan-Mar), I earned $20.05 from WordAds.
| Date | Earnings | Ads Served |
|---|---|---|
| January | 5.58 | 98,167 |
| February | 5.67 | 81,765 |
| March | 8.08 | 137,929 |
Visitors and Views for the above period are as follows,
| Date | Visitors | Views |
|---|---|---|
| January | 10,870 | 22,998 |
| February | 9,009 | 23,768 |
| March | 13,104 | 56,844 |
You can see there was a considerable bump once we hit March. I believe that was from making several supporting pages and posts for one of the game wikis I host on the site. I’m thinking the internal links to the new dedicated pages kept visitors on the site longer.
Since my social accounts only recently went away, I don’t think I’ll have any data points I can provide on traffic losses. Actually, my Reddit traffic increased by 120 visitors, and YouTube visitors dropped by 10 visitors under the previous period.
I don’t understand why there was a 50% drop in ads served for June. Site traffic was only off by 1.5k visitors. Maybe those 1.5k I missed were the prolific types who click on every picture and page?
| Date | Earning | Ads Served |
|---|---|---|
| April | $10.88 | 166,178 |
| May | $11.01 | 148,706 |
| June | $6.07 | 70,747 |
I only published 5 posts during June, and although I published 5 Pages, those don’t get the same visibility as a post.
Posts will at least show up in the WordPress Reader under Discover. Pages need to be found by search engines, by accident, or by placing a button on the navigation bar.
| Date | Visitors | Views |
|---|---|---|
| April | 14,970 | 90,314 |
| May | 14,783 | 83,595 |
| June | 13,297 | 73,843 |
My total earnings for Q2 are $27.96, adding last quarter to the total brings us to $48.01. Now, looking at the chart, I can see the math is off. It may be that the calculation for June that I am seeing is not the full value. It would be nice if that were the case.
I am almost to the $100 threshold required to request a cashout on my ad revenue. The cost of operating the site was calculated based on the sale pricing I received when I upgraded my plan.
That cost was $66 per year for 3 years. If I can manage $198 by the end of December 2026, then I can say it all worked out.
We’ll call it a close here, I think.
Sales on eBay continue apace, social media is all gone, and the game wikis continue to flourish.
Thanks for reading. See you next quarter (hopefully).
I have decided to upgrade my WordPress site to the Explorer plan so that I can monetize using WordAds.
There are already ads on the site from WordPress, but I do not currently benefit from those.
I had originally created *** because I ran out of Storage space here on this blog.
Once I complete the upgrade, I will have a great deal more space available. I am planning on eventually migrating the *** content back to this site.
My site traffic exploded in 2022 after I began playing “***.” That game drew in a lot of traffic. I started a Subreddit for the game, and I began building a Wiki.
But after I had created ***, my traffic dropped as a portion of my visitors were only looking for the content that I had moved to the other site.
The growth rate at *** has been solid for the most part. I have, of course, run out of space multiple times since its inception.
Last year, I began the long process of downloading all of my images and converting them from PNG/JPEG to the WebP format.
This reduced the file sizes and greatly improved my storage situation.
I must admit, it has been quite difficult getting clear data on WordAds. It has been somewhat embarrassing asking questions to which I already know the answer.
“It depends.”
That has been the answer in every forum post I have read. Indeed, my own posted questions have returned the same result. But this I already knew, even if I did not want to admit it.
I really just have to try it out and see where it goes.
I was able to find some blog posts by other users giving their own feedback and stories of using the service. This insight has been very encouraging, even when the outlook of other users has been bleak.
The cost of the upgrade to include WordAds access is $96 per year, not including the domain, which is free for the first year, and then $12 annually afterward. I am still an unemployed student, and my budget does not have much in the way of wiggle room.
I am still hitting up offers on Swagbucks, but that is a limited source of income. I only received $100 last month from bank account bonuses, and my dividend portfolio has been underperforming for the last 3 years.
My goal then is to earn at least half of that back in ad revenue. If I can cut my hosting expenses down to, say $50, then I could stomach the cost.
So, this is where I will stop for now. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments.
I will keep a log of my own successes or failures with WordAds. I plan on quarterly blog posts covering my own results. I’ll try and keep the subscription active for at least two years so that I might provide some clear data for others.
Thanks for reading, and be safe!
Read the next part of this story.
I have moved into Epics on the hardcore server. I am just bumping around Borderlands right now.
I stayed in the Heroics yesterday while I farmed Dreaming Dark for one of those Vibrant Purple Ioun stones. It took 18 runs to finally get it to show up. I almost completed my Quori monster manual deed in the process. I now have an Unsuppressed Vibrant and a Pale for the 50 charges of Absorb Magic.
Additionally, I reached my 1750 Favor reward and got the Bone Skull Helmet. It looks kinda silly on the Dragonborn, sort of reminds me of a cow skull on the hood of a car. After taking 20, I also received my Season 2 Sash, which is gray and features a skull with the numeral 2 at the bottom.
My favorite toon is all set to go at level 7. I have the full Red Fens gear set on him, and I have decided to level to 12 as a Sorcerer. That’ll get me my Chain Lightning, and then I can take 2 levels of Rogue for evasion and 4 levels of Paladin for the improved Saving throws, which will utilize my high Charisma score. With those splashed in at later levels, I can contend with the rising difficulty of the Elite dungeons, where I may not 1-shot all my targets.
For Gozoh, my Reaper toon, I intend to stay in epics until I have completed the Magister Epic Destiny. Although I do not intend to do an Epic reincarnation this time around. This will just give me time to farm tokens of The Twelve and grab some more gear for the Favor guy, for when he gets to Epics himself.
FWR 