Tag Archives: WordAds Revenue

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.

General Posts

My WordAds Experience (Q2)

July 19, 2024 Kasanje 1 Comment

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.

General Posts

My WordAds Experience (Q1)

April 15, 2024 Kasanje 3 Comments

See the previous post in this series.

Last month I decided to upgrade my WordPress plan to the premium Explorer plan with the intent to begin monetizing my site through ad placements using the WordAds service.

The Cost

I purchased my upgrade on March 16th. The final price tag of the plan was $222 for three years of service. When I went to make the upgrade there was a discount being offered for a full three-year registration.

The domain was free for the first year, included in all plans, and then $12 annually afterward.

I certainly wasn’t going to pass up such a good deal.

This brought my annual hosting cost down to $74. So this is the magic number that I will need to reach in advertising dollars to break even each year.

The Wait

I had some initial difficulties getting up and running with WordAds. After submitting an application for inclusion in the program I did not receive any responses other than a canned email.

After waiting four days (March 20), I returned to the application page. I was surprised to find a notice saying that my site was ineligible for WordAds. I contacted support right away.

I was a bit befuddled by the message, so I tried to get support using the Live Chat feature included in my upgrade.

Instead of a human, I was greeted by an AI.

I did eventually manage to get connected to a live representative, they call themselves “Happiness Engineers.” The conversation was quite long but I eventually was told that they could not tell me what the problem was and that someone would contact me.

I made sure to ask them about cancellation and a refund just in case I would not be able to utilize WordAds on my site.

The Problem

After 3 days of waiting I sent a follow-up email asking if they were close to finding an answer. I was worried because the 14-day time limit on cancellations was close approaching. All I got was silence.

After another six days (March 29), I received a response to my follow-up. A whole 13 days since I purchased the upgrade and applied for WordAds, and just 1 day left to be able to get a refund on the purchase.

The Answer

So it seems the bot that crawls the pages had made a mistake and flagged my site as not being family-friendly. The Happiness Engineer directed me to reapply to the program with a supplied link.

Following their advice, I returned to the application page and tried to reapply. But I got a different error message this time.

I returned to the email exchange with support staff and requested further assistance. The staff member eventually had to manually add me into the program.

The Conclusion

On March 29th, I was finally accepted into the WordAds program.

For March I had three days (29, 30, and 31) of advertising on my site before the ledger rolled over to April.

I have read that it usually takes around three months to get a clear idea of the revenues a site will generate as the advertisers get a feel for your site’s content and the types of visitors who frequent it.

I can see a direct correlation between the days where I have high traffic and the greater CPM levels. This is still the early testing phase but I did see some $0.50 and higher CPM levels on the more busy days.

I now need to refocus my energies on producing quality content and guides to further drive the growth of this site.