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.
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).
See the previous post in this series.
Earlier this year I made the decision to upgrade my WordPress account from a free to a paid plan. A big part of my decision was being able to monetize the site. I have tried my hand at affiliate marketing but have not had any success so far.
In the previous post, I detailed the costs of the upgrade and the discounts that I was able to apply to my purchase. My average cost per year is about 66 USD and so that has been my goal as far as revenues from the advertising on the site.
Divided by 9 (I started in March) it brings my monthly goal to 7.33 USD for ad revenue.
As you can see, my earnings have not yet reached that goal. April marked my first full month of advertising on the site. The FAQ page in the WordPress help files said that it would take up to 3 months for advertisers to fine-tune their presence on the site.
You can see there was a small drop in ads served after April, but this went up noticeably once June was finished.
Above you can see that I only published 3 posts for the period of June 17th through June 23rd. My visitor traffic was only 975 with total views of 1,720 pages.
The CPM was 0.26 USD which yielded revenues of 1.78 USD for that period. This was a large portion of the earnings for June.
I think the increased ads served came from completing the Daily Writing prompts.
These writing questions will often get a lot of traffic in the WordPress Reader and posts can garner Likes and Reblogs. On days when I complete a writing prompt, I will see my visitor traffic swell.
I still need 53.63 USD to break even this year on the cost of the upgrade. I am still hopeful that my site traffic will increase over time. My gaming guides continue to be the main source of site traffic.
I have tinkered with the idea of migrating over content from my other blog which gets more traffic, but I am concerned that it may not fall under the “family-friendly” guidelines for WordAds. This site received 15k views from April to June while the other site gets 17k+ each month.
Anyway, I will continue to track my progress and post another update for quarter three in October. Thanks for reading and have a great day!
See the next post in the series.
Fat Wallet Refugee 