Jason has a theory that click values in Adsense have increased since the introduction of the Yahoo Publishing Network and writes:
‘Just got that comment from a Adsense publisher. I can tell you we did see an up tick the last two days. I can’t get into exact details because of Adsense TOS. However, last week we set a single day record with ~$2,450. The last two days we did $2,913.23 and $3,070.11 with just a couple of more clicks (yes, that puts us way above the $1M yearly run rate… yahooooo!!! I mean… Yeah!!!).
This is not scientific, but it looks like a 10-15% boost when I take out the added clicks.’
I’m not so sure about this. I’ve done a quick survey of a few publishers via IM and they report mixed results this past week. Some are up – but I wonder whether it might be more to do with the change to vary the number of ads they are now showing per ad unit which they explain should lead to an increase in earnings:
‘To increase monetization on your site and improve the relevance of ads, AdSense now varies the number of text ads that appear in a given ad unit. In cases where we determine that increasing the size of the most relevant ads will improve performance, we’ll drop the lowest-performing ad or ads and expand the remaining ones to fill the entire unit. Showing fewer ads works to your advantage, allowing the better-performing ads to draw more user attention and click-throughs. Google AdSense technology will automatically determine the optimal number of ads to display on any page and will only show fewer ads when doing so will make you more money!’
Read more at AdSense Update – August 4 2005
My earning per click has increased these few days with similar CTR. But my traffic is too little to tell something. :)
If anything the competition from Yahoo would probably drive prices lower. My guess is that the increase Jason is seeing is a seasonal one – back to school ads are everywhere so I’m sure the bid amount for anything in that space has gone up.
I posted a theory on webdevsource.com that people leaving for Yahoo would leave more money in the Google Adsense pot. Perhaps the higher paying ads are just showing because less publishers are showing ads and running out the ad monies. It makes sense that less publishers showing ads means more money for those who stay with it as we get more of the inventory to show. I don’t think Google is paying more, we are just getting more ads than before with some people trying out yahoo.
That sounds plausible, Chris. I was thinking that it seems less likely to me that it could be explained by the new ad count & size variability, because I’d think that would really only affect the CTR, and Jason says it’s just a couple more clicks.
Though I suppose showing fewer ads with the same CTR would mean that visitors are more likely to click on higher paying ads. Maybe it’s a combination of factors?
I think that it is a combination of factors that is bringing my earnings up. Whatever it is I am not complaining.
I’ve noticed that Google has stepped up it’s crawling activities, it went deep on one of our sites that has been around for 4-5 months, but had been ignored. They are probably looking to increase their page count, since Yahoo recently touted 20 million pages. In all that crawling, our site’s ads have been clicked on much, much more. We are used to a .05% CTR, now we are seeing 5-6%.
So, Google is chasing Yahoo trying to find new pages, and clicking on their own ads at the same time.
Google’s crawler’s don’t see click their ads. If your site is better indexed then you’ll get more optimized ads. That is more likely to explain your increased CTR.
Mine has gone down by 60% ,also how do you know that guy makes that kind of money.I do get sick of him shoving it down eveybodies throat and bragging about it.Some of us are very poor it gets old to hear how much money they supposely make.This blog is in love with that guy.Weird
Here is a comic strip about AdSense fighting YPN:
http://comicstripblog.com/?p=145
I think that in near future we will here more stories about these 2 fighting… I hope only that blood of innocent bloggers will not be spilled in this battle… :-)
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