Just to keep things in perspective Jason Calacanis posts that Weblogs Inc is getting close to the number of dollars earned in a day that would take them to earning $1 million in a year.
He reports that they broke their previous record for a day’s earnings with Adsense and reached $2335 on a single day. The next target is $2739.72 in a day (the magic number that if they can maintain as an average for a year will get them to $1 million). Wow – those there are big numbers!
Jason reveals a tip for readers and writes:
‘One more tip: the Google horizontal banners work well. You know, the ones where a user clicks and sees a group of ads and then you get paid if they make a *second* click (the first click to Google gets you nothing!). Even with this double-click issue it performs really well (I don’t think I can say how much better then a leaderboard without getting in trouble with the Google Adsense Terms of Service, but lets just say it’s significant). I think this is because the users who click on those ads are rabid—they want a ton of information and they probably visit more then one advertiser’s site.’
I’ve highlighted the ads that he’s talking about over at Engadget in the following screen cap (click to enlarge).
It’s an interesting tip and one that I’ve been experimenting with myself (as I posted a week or so back). My experimentation with Google’s Adlink Ads (actually they now call them ‘link units’) is mixed. Readers here will remember I had these links at the very top of my blog for a week and I promised to share how they went. As Jason says we’re not allowed to give specific details of CTR and impressions but my experience in that position was poor – in fact it was poorer than when I had the 120 x 90 format in my sidebar.
However since moving the ads down underneath my menus at the top of the page the performance has improved – but only slightly.
I’ve tried a variety of positions for the banner style ‘link unitis’ but can’t report as good performance as what Jason seems to be getting. It is better than nothing at all, but for me it’s nowhere near as good an earner as the traditional text ads that I run which are the best performers for me by far.
I’m interested in other’s experiences with the ‘link unit’ ads. How do you use them? How have they performed (be careful not to reveal too many details).
I tried them on one of my other blogs, and again along with your experiences the results were very poor.
I would expect the results would be reasonable on very niche topics where researchers are struggling to find resources, but I wouldn’t think engadget would fall into that category (perhaps I’m wrong?).
I’ve always found that simply blending the ads, or keeping it simple, tends to bring the best results – I posted some of my own Adsense Tips the other day.
I’ve seen mixed reviews on the horizontal link units. My own experience with them over at Turboblogger.com have been kind of bland. They ARE producing a little income but my guess is that it’s only because that space was never used before, and I have them optimized about as much as I can. They’re in the hot zone, they look like a nav bar, the targeting is dead on, etc. But so far, nothing mind blowing.
As for WIN, they get a massive amount of network traffic so even a tiny improvement in CTR and earnings over another style of ad will translate into a fairly substantial boost in daily earnings.
I tryied links too and got very poor result :(
I’m trialing those kind of links at the moment, although in a vertical box at the top of the page.
I just switched from using contrasting colours to blended colours, which I’ll try for a nother two weeks and then do some comparisons on if it is giving me a reasonable return. Before, I had nothing in that place, so if I’m getting any clicks its got to be seen as a positive.
as for getting close to $1mil a year, that puts things into perspective – the amount the site is pulling in in one day, would be a dream for most people to get in a year.
Of course, we are talking about 70-80 sites here and, as Jason himself says, that has to support a lot of staff. It doesn’t include income from other ads though, which occupy the prime spots. Impressive, beyond doubt.
After reading Jason’s piece I’ve been trying them on http://xataka.com which is a Spanish language gadget blog. I must say that, with just three days data, they are performing in line with my best performing units, which happen to be in the same type of pages, without affecting their performance.
I have tried it also on blogs on other topics, but the results have not been that impressive.
Good info and the 1 million is a great income.But it would be nice to know on how many sites were necessary to build for that 1 million number.
JJ
I am still experimenting with link units, and so fat due to low traffic (still wotking on content) no luck. The better performer for me is the old standby leaderboard
I’ve also tried them briefly on a few sites and they didn’t do very well at all.
the horizontal ad link of my blog is weaker in overall. Average CTR, eCPM, and earning are lower than large rectangle unit in my blog.
JJ: we have 80 blogs.
How many people are working at Weblogs, Inc? I follow a couple of their blogs, and they post a ton every day. It’d be interesting to know how much of their revenue is profit and how much goes back into paying employees and paying for hosting. Thanks!
While the vertical version was not successful, the horizontal one works really well. I’ve added horizontal “link units” to http://SharpToolbox.com and http://JavaToolbox.com since the beginning of the month and until now, my revenues have improved a lot compared to last month.
One more proof that optimization for AdSense is very different from one site to another. I think they work well for my sites because the visitors are really searching for targeted information.
Very interesting strategy here.
Hire folks to write Blogs, and put AdSense on them.
So simple, one would think…but it hasn’t quite worked that way for us yet at the Heartland Blog Network.
Click my name, and you’ll see.
Baby steps, I suppose?
The fundemental business model is simple but like any business sucess depends soley on the quality of your strategy and how you execute it.
I have just set up some link units at the top of my page and I am wondering if they will pay off as regular search results, which tend to pay higher than site ads, and that might be making the difference. I set them up here:
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