My Advertising and Affiliate Earnings Graph – August 29 to December 19

A number of people have asked me recently how earnings have been for me in the lead up to Christmas. I’m not going to get into figures (I’ve done that enough this year) but I thought I’d show a graph to give an idea of how the past three or four months have gone.

The graph below (click to enlarge in a new window) shows my advertising and affiliate earnings by category from 29 August (the day I started using Chitika – reviewed here). I’ve made the categories AdSense, Chitika, Chitika Referrals, Amazon, Miscellaneous and Clickbank. I have not included other sources of income like Six Figure Blogging, consulting and b5media.

Here is the graph. I’ll make a few comments below it.

Comments, Explanations and Observations

• The Miscellaneous category includes BlogAds, Adbrite ads, a few text ads and sponsorships (I had one with Adobe and another with Ricoh over the past couple of months).
• The Miscellaneous and Amazon numbers are averages spread across each month (ie in December you’ll notice all Amazon earnings are the same).
• The Chitika figures are Unaudited numbers. My audits have been in the vicinity of 10% each month so far so you can visualize some decreases.
• You’ll notice a decrease in Chitika earnings and Chitika Referal earnings in the past month. This coincides pretty closely with the 1st of December change in the way they filter ads. I’m expecting a lower audit this month as a result.
• The peak days were just after thanksgiving from memory – days where online sales are traditionally strong.
• Amazon sales have been particularly good in December – over triple normal figures.
• You’ll notice a dip in AdSense earnings in the middle of the period. There is probably a number of reasons for this. It’s partly due to the introduction of Chitika (ie CTR went down as a result of there being competing ads). Also I noticed the Cost per Click went down a little with Adsense for me in the lull before Chrismas. It has returned in the past few weeks.
• Traffic levels have increased in the past few weeks. This will account for some of the increases over the past few months. I’m expecting that this graph will have a downturn in the weeks after Christmas as traffic slows.
• Traffic is not the only reason for the increases in Chitika. The first few weeks earnings were steady as I didn’t optimize them well and did not have them on all of my blogs. In September and October I expanded my use of them and got smarter with my optimization. You can see that they work well on the topics I cover – particularly my consumer electronic blogs.

It has obviously been an exceptional few months with over 100% growth (at it’s peak it was over triple). As I say – I’m expecting to see a downward slope in the coming weeks but am hopeful that it will maintain a healthy level once the holiday periods are over.

Update: Rick’s also done a very similar post here