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I got so busy with my eBay reselling that I forgot I had this series of posts I had said I would run. It is now partway through Q1 of 2025, so I have a little catching up.
Q3 – July, August, and September
Site traffic for these months was roughly the same as the previous period. But I did see an uptick in the number of ads displayed. I would attribute the increased ad views to the continued fine-tuning of ads on the more popular post topics.
As mentioned in the previous article, my goal is to reach $66 in annual earnings. This should cover the price I paid for the premium hosting plan featuring ad revenue.
| Month | Ads Served | Avg CPM | Revenue |
|---|---|---|---|
| July | 22,531 | $0.23 | $5.11 |
| August | 37,472 | $0.24 | $9.09 |
| September | 30,110 | $0.20 | $6.05 |
I’m not entirely certain why the revenues shot up for August. The increased traffic was nice, but it seemed to peak and then fall off the next month.
The only thing I can think of is that I had panicked and delisted around 20 posts after my other site was flagged for inappropriate content. Since the sites were closely linked to each other, I figured I needed to wipe out any references.
That “flagging” had been in error due to a bad bot, and customer service was able to remove the suspension. They also clarified that the site was not in violation of any rules.
After I got the green light, I relisted all the taken-down posts. This caused a surge in traffic to the “new” posts. Both the Google and Bing web crawlers showed an uptick in analytical data during this period. Many of those old posts had been removed from the indexes because they were old and didn’t get much traffic.
Q4 – October, November, and December
The holiday season was quite busy for me, which was a bit odd. As an atheist, I don’t celebrate anything and rarely go in for the irreligious events either.
Of course, if you shove a turkey my way, I’m not gonna pass off the food.
Anyway, I was busy with my eBay sales in the 4th quarter. I did some good sales volume and was able to finish the year at a break-even on my Excel balance sheet.
| Month | Ads Served | Avg CPM | Revenue |
|---|---|---|---|
| October | 33,274 | $0.15 | $5.00 |
| November | 33,556 | $0.20 | $6.87 |
| December | 64,570 | $0.11 | $7.05 |
The site traffic seemed to hit a plateau in October and November, and I figured I had found my sweet spot between the wind and waves. I was a bit miffed at the lower CPM in Oct, as you can see it dropped to $0.15 and I lost $1.05 in revenue earnings compared with Sept.
November saw a return to better numbers despite no change in site traffic. I was starting to see a confluence of visitors on three posts in particular, though.
The Game of Vampires Wiki page I had created was getting some really good numbers and had been edging close to the top of my traffic list for several months.
I was still seeing steady traffic on the Game Guides for Puzzles and Chaos and some other high-value offers. I think it was around this time when some of the offers started going into the four-digit range and the Reddit folks were going nuts.
In December, I received around 7k more views than the previous months and 2,440 more visitors. The CPM went down drastically, but I did see an increase in my site revenue. I think many of the extra views were from repeat customers.
Top Traffic Sources
Sept’s top post was Puzzles and Chaos, for Oct it was the Game of Vampires Wiki, but come Nov, both were supplanted by the Top Girl Wiki. The game had gone through a couple of rebrands as the Alpha and Beta releases were cleared away.
I think writing a “Wiki” instead of a game guide made the difference.
Honestly, the Fandom-branded (Wikia) sites are all covered in terrible, unsafe advertisements. I can understand why someone would prefer to come to FWR instead.
There are many sites with guides, but few that claim to be a wiki, and that is what people are searching for when they look for guides. They type in “game wiki” or “game Reddit” to find info on whatever game they need help with.
The traffic to Top Girl Wiki tripled between November and December.
I also realized that the page I had thrown together was loading slowly on mobile devices and that the majority of my traffic was from cell phones. So, I added separate posts for a lot of the content, and I started using Pages instead of Posts.
This allowed me to set the wiki page as a Parent Page and the associated articles as Child Pages. The hierarchy makes for a more structured design format. Basically, it’s easier to navigate.
That will be all for this quarterly report on Wordads. I will try and remember to write another one in April 2025.
Fat Wallet Refugee 