As of last month, we noted a bit of a decline in ad revenues concerning our case study domain. Where we recorded earnings of $19,199 throughout June 2022, July saw us slump down to $17,609. As we’ve detailed in last month’s revenue report (which you can check out by clicking on that tab up there), this isn’t merely impacting us. It seems that other publishers are having a pretty bad month, as well.
So, fret not if you’re also noticing a sharp drop in ad returns this past July. In fact, Ezoic’s own metrics showed that July 2022’s ad earnings across the board – including its competitors – were worse than the rest of the year… Even compared to January. But, that’s last month’s news, as August was a return to form, to some degree. Throughout August, our case study domain earned $18,476 in ad revenues.
These gains were partly thanks to the increased traffic inflow towards our case study domain. For the first time ever, we managed to attract more than half a million visits, at around 504,000. Plus, it was recorded alongside all-time-high pageviews and engaged pageviews, with more than 614,000 as well as over 343,000 of them, respectively. These are our highest figures yet, so that’s a good sign.
It somewhat made up for the fact that our August EPMVs (earnings per thousand visitors), were about $36.65. This is technically higher than July, but lower than the $40s that we notched in previous months when the monetization was more lucrative. The data that we’re seeing right now is more encouraging, in that there’s hope we could see a return to higher-earning ad incomes in the following months.
| August 2022 Ad Revenue From Ezoic | ||
|---|---|---|
| Revenue (Total) | $18,476.40 | |
| Traffic | Visits | 504,074 |
| Pageviews | 614,438 | |
| Engaged Pageviews | 343,568 | |
| ePMV (Earnings Per Thousand Visitors) | $36.65 | |
Key Figures
Now that we’ve gotten the highlights out of the way, there’s plenty of fascinating nitty-gritty data in August 2022’s ad earnings. For starters, there are the ad returns that we earned from Ezoic’s mediation tools. This is where Ezoic allows us to monetize our case study domain alongside AdSense. If Google’s AdSense could earn you more for ad placements, Ezoic would embed those ads instead of their own.
It’s a great option to try and maximize your revenues as much as possible, and we can see the results here… The bulk of August’s ad revenues (as with every other month) came from Ezoic’s ads, bringing in around $12,755. On top of that, Google’s AdSense (through Ezoic mediation) did some good work, too. They raked in another $2,234 for us – not a huge sum by any means, but this certainly helps.
In addition to those two aforementioned figures, there are also our earnings from being a part of Ezoic’s Premium Ad Partners program. By taking part, we’re allowing high-paying, big-name advertisers to place their ads onto our case study domain. Naturally, they’d pay more compared to regular advertisers. So, that alone netted us another $3,488. There is a caveat with this that needs mentioning, though.
Ezoic requires that publishers in their Premium partners program pay a premium beforehand. With us being in the higher tiers, we have to pay Ezoic $2,200 per month to be a part of its Premium program. So, our net profit would be $1,288 ($3,488 – $2,200). It’s a pretty high price to pay, but Ezoic’s ensured that this program will always net you more in earnings than you’re paying them, so it’s well worth it.
Studying Some Data
Personally, I would’ve liked to see more growth compared to the $18,476 that we’ve earned over this past August. But, I’d have to accept that these figures are just about okay, especially given the market and taking into account several major search algorithm changes. Most of the traffic on our case study domain is routed from Google. Therefore, algorithm updates there can make or break these earnings.
On most days over this past August, our case study domain averaged in the high-$500s to low-$600s in daily ad revenues. There were several days where this dropped to the mid-$500s. But, it was more or less balanced out with those days when we netted mid- to high-$600s per day. Before, peaking at an all-time high (for August 2022) of about $701 in daily ad revenues, documented in late August.
Adsense Mediation Earnings
Overall, it’s contributed to a roughly 4% increase in total monthly ad revenues over July. Still, I hoped for more on the EPMV side of things, as we only saw an approximately 40-cent increase over July. It’s green across the board traffic-wise at least, as we mentioned earlier. Also, for those who are curious, there’s a reason why we’re referencing data from Ezoic’s Big Data analytics instead of Google’s.
Some of you publishers may have noticed a peculiar increase in traffic this past August from a series of smaller countries like Seychelles and the Czech Republic. I can’t really explain why there is this traffic spike, but Google’s analytics counted that traffic in its analytics data, even though it’s likely sourced by bot traffic. Nevertheless, this particular metric was detected and blocked by Ezoic, so the data here is more representative of real-world traffic. Another thing that helped us from absorbing all this bot traffic onto our case study domain (which is unlikely to be monetized, anyway), is using Cloudflare’s bot management software.
Year-On-Year Growth
Speaking of data, I thought to take this time to show just how far our case study domain has grown over this past year. Using Ezoic, we’re able to look at the 30-day period of August 2021 compared to August 2022.
In short, it’s an astonishing and humbling display of how far we’ve come. In one year, our ad revenue grew by around 215%. Additionally, we saw a 198% improvement in visits, and a 217% increase in pageviews, on top of another 179% growth in engaged pageviews. Whereas that case study domain, the same one, earned about $6,000 throughout August 2021, it more than tripled this past August.
You can see quite clearly how consequential our switch from purely AdSense to monetizing with Ezoic has been since we began 23 months ago. August 2021 saw us earning around $200 per day, while it tripled to around $600 in August 2022. Alas, the EPMVs are, once again, stubbornly unchanged, with a roughly 3.25% growth, year-over-year. Of course, we had to do a lot of heavy lifting here, as well.
All those earnings have been heavily re-invested into new content for our case study domain. We had continually managed to pump out at least 100 unique keyword-focused articles in the past few months, in addition to August’s (114 articles). Beyond that, I’ve been working hard to optimize and maximize the site’s monetization, too. This includes the work put into extensive keyword research, and so forth.
SEO And Traffic Optimization
With that in mind, I thought to show you another piece of data that I’ve not revealed before… Where is all the traffic to our case study domain coming from? While this seems inconsequential at first, it’s quite the opposite, actually. To put it simply, the ad market (and thus, monetization rates) varies from one region of the world to another. So, you could be earning more in ad revenues in one country.
While at the same time, raking in less if your site’s traffic mostly comes from other parts of the world. As is typical for most ad network providers, traffic from mainly English-speaking countries like the US, UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia usually pays out the most in ad revenues. That’s why we optimized our case study domain to cater to a USA audience, as ads there are the most lucrative.
This includes using US English alongside references, phrases, or vocabulary that are familiar and more well-understood by Americans. As you can see down below, this certainly did work, with a majority (about 70%) of traffic coming from the US. You’re also able to see how the US has a higher average EPMV compared to other countries, $45 in comparison to $30s and $20s.
If you’re setting up a blog for the first time, I’d highly recommend optimizing the keywords and content to be more US-focused, if you’re intent on maximizing your ad revenues. Though our case study domain had initially been focused on a UK-based audience (and it still is with certain formats of content), it made more sense for us to pivot to the US, seeing how its average EPMVs are double that of the UK.
Video Hosting
Recently, I’ve been experimenting with another side of Ezoic that wasn’t explored all too often – video hosting. For those who don’t know, Ezoic has its own video hosting service. You could think of it as an alternative to YouTube. Here, you can host videos on Ezoic, embed them onto your website, and have them monetized through Ezoic’s ad system. At first, I wasn’t sure about how this feature worked.
But over time, I tried it out anyway and began uploading a selection of edited videos onto Ezoic just to see the results. As time passed, the results are pretty good. In this past August, those videos netted our case study domain another $952 in ad revenues, on top of the previous figures. I dare say that it’s something that I’m definitely going to explore more and experiment with in the following months.
So, if you have any videos that you want to share alongside written content, I’d highly suggest giving this feature a try. I do think that these figures will even out over the next month. At the moment, I’ve been tweaking some settings here and there, and generally just seeing how it rides out. But once it’s all configured, I’d expect somewhere around $25 to $30 per day in video-based ad revenues alone. With our current amount of videos.
This would increase gradually over time as I begin creating and posting more videos, though. Yet, for a secondary source of revenue, it’s not that bad. Moreover, it’s a neat way to somewhat compensate for the slightly reduced EPMVs that we (and most other publishers) are experiencing for their written content at the moment. Speaking of, what’s all this fuss with the decreased EPMVs and ad revenues, then?
Ad Revenue Index
You can see this for yourself by checking out Ezoic’s Ad Revenue Index. This is a table, showcasing the general ad revenue trends across the entire market, which impacts all publishers, including us. We’ve seen here how average ad revenues have dropped a tiny bit over the last year. For instance, we could note that August 2022 recorded an index value that ranged between 44 to 52 – not a bad month.
But on the other hand, August 2021’s index value typically averaged in the mid- to high-50s. And, it’s not even counting an impressive spike in early August, jumping to 78 – not too sure why it happened. What this tells us is that monetization as a whole is suffering, and other publishers are experiencing that same dip, as well. Despite notching all-time-high traffic inflows, our ad revenues are dropping.
So, this probably explains why you, a fellow publisher, are likely seeing your ad earnings dropping over the past few months. It goes to show how bad it is when July and August’s average market-wide ad revenues are worse than January’s. The latter is infamous for its brutally low EPMVs and CPMs. Alas, it is what it is, and there’s not much that we, as publishers, can do about these market conditions.
All we can do is hope that the ad market and monetization rates do improve, as we lead up to 2022’s year-end. And to be fair, this isn’t just impacting publishers monetizing with Ezoic. Other ad providers are documenting similar dips in ad returns… AdSense, AdThrive, Mediavine, and so on. The only thing that can reverse it is if more advertisers are buying up more ad spots and are paying more for them.
Google Algorithm Changes
As I’ve highlighted beforehand, most of our traffic is sourced from Google Search. As such, it’s worth discussing another major update that occurred in August 2022, which was a major Google algorithm update. This is a complex issue to delve into. Nonetheless, even a minute update to a search engine can severely impact how visible our case study domain is. Thus, impacting its growth and earnings.
As you may know, we’ve consistently been cranking out at least 100 articles for several months now. Yet, I’m not seeing as much growth as I wanted to. That’s especially so considering how much effort, work, and time has been put into creating all that content. Plus, that has to balance out how much I have to pay the writing and editing team, alongside the usual costs and fees of running a website and business.
One factor that may explain this stagnation is those Google search algorithm updates. It’s possible that our case study domain, given the content that goes into it, has been affected. To put it simply, it may mean that Google isn’t favoring our site nearly as much as it once did. Given how much money I’ve invested into new content recently, I would hope for monthly increases of 100,000 pageviews.
However, we’ve seen earlier that this isn’t the case. Still, this hasn’t dampened my confidence as we’ll head into another busy month. And, we’ll most definitely stick with Ezoic for the foreseeable future, in seeing how well it’s served us so far. If you’re just starting out as a publisher, we’d recommend taking a peek at all the perks, benefits, and incentives that Ezoic provides compared to other ad networks.
For a more in-depth deep dive into our case study domain’s August 2022 ad revenues, I’ve also made a video to discuss this in detail…
Article Production
Here is the last 3 months’ rate of content production so you have an idea of the volume of content we are publishing.
| Recent Articles Produced Per Month | |
|---|---|
| Month | Articles |
| June 2022 | 132 |
| July 2022 | 118 |
| August 2022 | 114 |
| Last 3 Month Total | 364 |
Supporting Payment Evidence
To help show that our earnings are as honest and authentic as possible I will include some additional evidence from time to time.
As mentioned for this month we will receive a payment from Ezoic and another payment via Adsense. Below is the email confirmation from Payoneer.
Payoneer Email
Here you can see the payout from Adsense via Ezoic’s mediation tool for £1,877.58 which is converted from $2,004 that was owed.
