Time, like the tides keeps on rolling along. This March is no different. It seems almost to be crawling in the NE USA. Winter is about over yet the temperature plunged to 10 Degrees F overnight, and there’s little new to report on our sites, except that they continue to grow in traffic.
The growth in revenue is a different story and direction. It’s the revenue that keeps us working. Thank goodness for our other loyal advertisers and some affiliate programs!
Oh, yes, we figured out how to post Google AdSense text and graphic ads on our blog sites, like this one, and also recently ran into the Beyond AdSense movement. We’re not sure just how significant the latter is, but we have seen echos of their commentary in our website traffic & AdSense revenue.
Our growth, our hit rate on ads increase and yet… strangely, our revenue from AdSense diminishes. Despite this, our position on Google Searches and other SE pages stays high!
The drop off in revenue began after Google went public. It has gotten steadily worse over time, despite a significant increase in traffic on our sites (and serious effort on our part). As Google stock value went up our share (we think) of the shared income went down.
One of the serious limitations with the AdSense Program is that Google doesn’t tell its advertising partners anything about the share percentage. It can make one a bit curious as to why and make Google’s motivation suspect.
So, we are pushing other things to help finance our work. We are more into selected affiliate programs and direct ad sales. As yet, on average, they don’t come close to matching our share of Google’s income, but they do contribute and they are, strangely, growing faster than Google income (Yea!!).
You’ll notice the Beyond AdSense banners on our sites, now. We’ll see if they outpace Google’s AdSense ads on this site-both are new as of today. It’s an interesting side-by-side experiment that we will run for a month or so. Much depends on the relative rate of return and growth.
We’ll report on this sometime in April. Meanwhile, look around our sites. The newest, lehos for Headlines is quickly growing in traffic and seems to be filling an unmet need to organized science and industrial measurement news.
