I watched a video on YouTube the other day that I felt especially compelled by. It got me to stop and think a bit more about my previous YouTube channels and to reconsider posting videos.
When I decided to close GameGirlsGallery (GGG), I also deleted my ASMR and Thrifting channels as well. They other two had fewer than a hundred subscribers, so it wasn’t any real loss.
After 18 months, GGG had well over a thousand subscribers and I regularly got comments and engagement on the content I posted. The decision to close the channel was difficult, but necessary. It was the same with removing that type of content from this website (Hard Choices: Removing Site Content).
Well, yesterday, I decided to go ahead and try again with YouTube. I’m terrible with following through on plans, but I will try to do a live stream every Wednesday and a recorded video once a week.
Ideally, I would like to be able to livestream with my phone, but you need 50 subscribers to do livestreams using the YouTube app. I thought about doing it in the office, but its so messy here, I’d be quite embarrassed.
I ordered an action camera off of eBay for 20 bucks and that should arrive sometime next week if holiday traffic doesn’t slow the parcel down. Its magnetic and has a lanyard and metal pad that can fit under clothes. That will allow me to film while I am out sourcing, but still keep my hands free.
I really wanted an Insta360 Go 3S, but its way out of my price range. My wallet can’t handle anything that fancy. Hopefully, the generic I bought will be able to manage my needs.
Other than videos related to eBay, I will likely include some slideshow videos of my domestic travel blog series.
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.
YouTube
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.
First Quarter
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.
Second Quarter
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 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.
Goddess Era
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 