$368,636 – Final Case Study Ezoic Earning Report

Well, here it is, after roughly 3.5 years of regular reporting and updates (42 whole months, specifically), it’s time to finally end our Ezoic case study. The reason is quite simple, particularly if you’re a fellow publisher or an SEO who’s seen what’s been going on recently with Google. As such, I just don’t think that our long-running Ezoic case study, in its current form, remains an ideal demonstration of properly effective SEO methods, optimizing display ads, and maximizing monetization through content creation.

More on Google later, though. For now, when we started this case study back in October 2020, we knew that it had to be finalized at some point. So, it’s a shame that this is how it ends, with our case study domain’s monthly ad revenues teetering at all-time lows, but it is what it is, things won’t be in our favor forever. If anything, I dare say there’s no better time than to end this case study now and move on to something else. All in all, after 3.5 years, our Ezoic case study had earned a total ad revenue of $368,636 – not bad at all, I’d say.

Speaking of, the biggest elephant in the room here is Google. I’m sure all our fellow publishers of niche sites or blog sites might know this all too well, but since around August or September 2022, there has been a tectonic shift in Google’s search engine algorithm. Gradually, our case study domain was impacted too, and in the months that followed, we continually saw declining site traffic. And subsequently, this meant lower ad revenues. This was the beginning of Google’s so-called ‘Helpful Content Update’, or HCU guidelines.

This was Google’s way of filtering out and cleaning up all those urls, sites, and content on their search engine, and trying to prioritize more concise, human-focused, and ‘helpful’ content. For a long time, we’ve been battling Google’s HCU updates and re-optimizing our case study domain as best as we could… Cleaning up our site maps, creating detailed author profiles to meet Google’s EEAT guidelines, massively refreshing and re-optimizing bulks of our content, improving the case study domain’s Core Web Vitals, and much more.

Google’s HCU Updates Were The Beginning Of The End

At some point, we had hoped that all these changes could materialize into our case study domain returning back to the top of Google’s search engine results page (SERP), as we once were. Unfortunately, we saw gradual and continual declines in site traffic and ad revenues. Then, finally, Google’s March 2024 Core updates were pretty much the final nail in the coffin (more on that later). Even after 1.5 years of continual optimization and making huge changes to our site, it was a losing battle, especially considering how high up we were before that.

Just to give you some context as to how painful of a drop it’s been, our case study domain peaked back in June 2022, with the entire month’s ad revenues peaking at $19,199. It was a really good month, with daily revenues of at least $600 to $700, for most of the entire month. I remember back when we first started monetizing with Ezoic and began reporting on this case study domain. At the time, our entire monthly ad revenue for the whole of October 2020 was around $600. On top of that, May to August 2022 saw increasing site traffic.

In particular, August 2022 saw a new high for our case study domain in terms of site visits and pageviews, with over 500,000 monthly visits for that month alone. For context, back in October 2020, when this all began, our monthly page visits were just barely 35,000 users. The major catalyst for this rapid rise in such a short span of time was twofold – 1) we found and further refined an SEO strategy that worked brilliantly for us, and 2) our decision to monetize our content with Ezoic allowed us to better maximize our display ads earnings.

But then, Google started releasing the first updates and guidelines of what we would later know as HCU. This happened right around September 2022. From that point onward, our case study domain saw declines in site traffic, and consequently, display ads revenue, which we never properly recovered from. At first, it was gradual, but August 2023 is when our monthly ad earnings dropped below the five-digit mark, netting us $9,248. Then, not that long later, by December 2023, our case study domain flatlined to a mere $2,721.

Brutally Harsh Manual Actions From Google

January and February of 2024 weren’t that much better, and believe it or not, it only got worse in March. Google released its March 2024 Core update, bringing new changes and optimizations to how its ubiquitous search engine ranks sites. For those of you who missed it, Google’s newest March 2024 update (as of writing, anyway) was targeting sites that created spammy, low-quality, mass-generated, and scaled content. Admittedly, while our case study domain was designed to be helpful and insightful, we did generate a lot of content, with our writing team long before generative AI was a thing, but Google took us down with it by classing our content as mass-scaled content (content built for search engines, which is true).

So, that’s a no-no in Google’s eyes, so no matter how much we tried to make our content as user-centric or as concise as possible to provide genuinely great content to aid our audience, from a technical perspective, we were technically in the wrong, at least according to Google. This was made even worse when Google placed a manual action on our case study domain, forcing us to make radical changes. Google’s HCU eroded site traffic back to a standstill and ground it to a halt, and now, we were at risk of losing the domain altogether.

As a result, we had to make huge updates and sacrifices to our case study content to comply with Google’s new spam policies, especially concerning mass automation and scaled content, all in a bid to lift that manual action. This did work, but at what cost? Personally, I didn’t feel like this was fair, given that I genuinely believed all the content we created had good intent behind them, to provide valuable insights and guide our readers. Sure, we may have been a tad aggressive with SEO optimization, but not at a huge cost to the audience.

But alas, Google wasn’t willing to compromise on this one. With that being said, while this might be the end of our current Ezoic case study, reporting-wise and updates at least, it’s not the end for us. In fact, we’re pretty far off from quitting altogether. As we’ll take a look later, this entire venture has been rather successful financially, so it’s hardly time to walk away just yet. If anything, seeing what we’ve been able to do in the past, despite all these challenges, we may even start new case studies, and provide further insights into earning with Ezoic.

A Fresh Beginning Beckons, And Starting Anew

Therefore, while we’re ending our current case study here, do check back, as we’ll have plenty more guides and reviews, as well as in-depth analyses and reports to come. After all, we had earned over $368,636 from our case study domain earnings, mostly from ad revenues. This proved that, aside from Google’s HCU updates forcing us to alter our content creation strategy, most of the techniques and processes that we’ve discussed in prior guides worked really well for us, be it doing proper keyword research or choosing the right ad network provider.

Things like sorting out your on-page SEO, or crafting an efficient or reliable workflow for creating content online to make money, did work, and the fundamentals of what we sought after continue to work. So, if you do desire insights, resources, and guides to help you grow as a publisher and build a career off of content creation, there are plenty of them here, all for free! Or, you could also check out my paid training course to learn more, too. As I mentioned earlier, this entire Ezoic display ads case study and SEO guides have been really lucrative.

In total, we spent around $150,000 in direct content creation costs – hiring writers and editors. This means that our clean profit is about $218,000, which is nothing to scoff at, by any means. It’s nevertheless a shame that we had to finalize our case study this way, and seeing where it is at now, but as a whole, it’s been a financially successful venture. But, the question remains… Where are we going next? Well, that’s not yet certain, but there are so many new opportunities out there.

Who knows, maybe our future isn’t too different from what we were doing before – it’s all a matter of understanding what Google is looking for, and ensuring that we create genuine, unique, and user-centric content. We’ll be sure to report back once we’ve figured things out for the future, so do check in to keep yourself up to date!