I’m interested to see today that there are a number of threads at Webmaster World’s forums that seem to be reporting poor earnings by Adsense publishers over the past few days. (for example here, here and here).
These sorts of threads appear all year around of course but particularly at this time of the year. In fact I’ve had a number of emails and IM’s from people today expressing concern about their Adsense earnings. Why are they down? I’d say it’s for a number of reason:
1. Summer – Whilst I’m currently shivering down here in Melbourne, the Northern Hemisphere is into Summer which is traditionally a flat patch for many websites. People are traveling and enjoying the great outdoors. Until we work out a way to get them surfing the web more whilst sunbathing, swimming, playing golf etc – many sites will have to put up with a little less traffic. Of course for some sites summer is peak time. I imagine travel sites, sports equipment sites etc would be doing ok.
In addition to lower traffic levels – many believe that advertisers decrease the amount they are willing to pay per click at this time of year as a result of the summer holidays. In fact my traffic levels are not too bad at the moment – fairly stable – it’s mainly a decrease in earnings per click that are bringing my overall earnings down (check out this thread for more summer holiday theories and information).
2. 4th of July – a fairly significant proportion of the web surfing market in North America had a long weekend. This always has an impact.
3. London Bombings – a number of bloggers and websites are reporting decreases in earnings today with lower CTR and traffic in some cases. This is understandable. I suspect web usage would be high at the moment (BBC’s site crashed and many others were very slow last night here) but most people were not searching for the type of information that they are normally looking for. Understandable.
My advice – take a ‘blogging as normal’ type approach. In fact while everyone else is on holidays either join them or work doubly hard on your blog so that you reap the rewards in the months ahead. Oh and remember that the Pre-Christmas rush is less than 6 months away!
