$17,963 – September 2022 Ezoic Earnings Report

Another month, another decline in ad revenue… Which has been the common trend as of late. Back in June 2022, our case study domain notched new all-time highs, with $19,199 in ad earnings alone. Yet, it continued on a downward trend to $17,609 in July, and back up a tiny bit to $18,476 in August. For all of September 2022, it looks like there’s no sign of recovery just yet, as we’ve netted $17,693.

To be fair, these are still good figures, putting us in the black. But, with how much content we’re now creating for our case study domain, I had hoped for more. Granted, there’s a good reason why we see these gradual declines over time, and this is owed to changes in Google’s search engine core algorithm updates.

Our case study domain recorded more than 451,000 page visits and nearly 550,000 pageviews for the month of September 2022. Of the latter, around 307,000 of them are classified as engaged audiences by Ezoic’s data analytics. All three of those aforementioned figures are a roughly 7% drop respectively from August 2022 – where we noted new records in traffic inflows. Not good news, overall.

But at the very least, our EPMV (earnings per thousand visitors) did increase by 8% over August 2022, with an average of $39.81. That alone went a long way in propping up our ad revenues, ensuring that we could continue earning handsomely enough, despite the lower traffic. It’s only a short way off the $40s that we’d earned in prior months, back when monetization was at its peak. So, what gives?

 

September 2022 Ad Revenue From Ezoic
Revenue (Total)		$17,963.01
Traffic	Visits	451,257
	Pageviews	549,607
	Engaged Pageviews	307,241
ePMV (Earnings Per Thousand Visitors)		$39.81

Key Figures

Another thing to note is that not all of the $17,963 that we earned throughout September came from Ezoic alone. For starters, we’ve taken part in Ezoic’s Premium program. Thus, we can ensure that our case study domain would be eligible to attract high-paying advertisers. With that in mind, breaking it down… We earned about $3,436 from Premium advertisers, while around $12,186 made up the rest (also from Ezoic, but with regular advertisers).

Also, our case study domain adopts Ezoic’s clever mediation tool. This is where we can monetize with both Ezoic and another ad network provider. In this case, we’re relying on Google’s AdSense, which earned us an additional roughly $2,345 from there. The one downside of these figures is the high fees with Ezoic’s Premium program. Which, mind you, we have to pay upfront, and it’s not really ideal.

With the level of revenue that we’re earning for our case study domain right now, the Premium fees are a hefty $2,200 per month. So, we’re actually earning somewhere around $15,763 (when you take into account those Premium fees). Still, at least we’re earning more from the Premium program than we’ve spent, so it’s not a bad investment.

At the very start of the month (September), we had consistently earned in the low to high-$600s. The highest daily ad revenue for the entire month was about $687. But as you can see in that chart way up above, those per-day ad earnings continued to drop past the mid-point of September. By the last day of the month, we’re getting daily ad revenues in the low-$400s. Such declines in earnings are no doubt frustrating.

Google’s Core Updates September 2022

So, what’s behind these nosediving traffic data and ad revenues? Well, if you’re also a publisher, then you may be asking the same questions, as many other publishers seem to be experiencing those same declines over the past couple of months. Well, it turns out that Google made some major updates to its search engine algorithm. Essentially, these core updates can make or break entire websites.

Ultimately, changes in how the world’s largest search engine indexes and ranks your site could either bring more growth to your business. Or, severely limit your site’s visibility in no time at all. Should the algorithm decide to rank your site higher up in the search results, then good! Now, more folks would be more likely to visit your webpage. But for whatever reason, your site might start ranking lower.

This is something that we’re seeing with our case study domain, too. The way Google ranks its search results based on the type of content, and relevancy around a particular topic, among other factors, is now changing. For our case study domain specifically, it has negatively impacted us. For instance, some of our pages, which had previously ranked in the top-10 (the first page of Google) has been demoted.

And, we all know that most internet users aren’t as likely to go to the second page of Google. So, it does limit the visibility and would-be traction for some of our content, which is annoying. In addition, it’s not likely that we could combat or easily “game the algorithm”. So, we (and other publishers who are noticing similar drops) will likely have to get used to similar declines for a few more months until it re-adjusts.

Year-On-Year Growth

 

On the other hand, there’s still some good news to be had, though. For example, that relatively small 8% uptick in the EPMV is a bigger deal than you might think. Quite simply, it means that there’s more demand for ad placements. With more advertisers betting against one another for those coveted ad spots on our websites (and yours, too), we publishers will get a bigger share of the ad revenues per ad spot in return.

Another interesting dataset to analyze is just how far we’ve come since last year (September 2021). A good day, as of last year, would net our case study domain in the low to mid-$200s. Meanwhile, we’d be earning around $600 every 24 hours these days. That fairly significant difference does give us hope that we’re still heading in the right direction. The same goes for traffic too – far, far bigger numbers.

 

Specifically, 147%, 163%, and 135% increases in page visits, pageviews, and engaged pageviews from September 2021 to September 2022, respectively. All those analytics then leads us to another piece of data that we’ve not looked at in-depth before… Where most of our traffic is coming from. You can see in that pie chart up above that a whopping 69% of our case study domain’s traffic is routed from Google.com.

This further emphasizes just how consequential those Google core updates can be. But then again, it’s been said before that our modus operandi for optimizing ad revenues from traffic acquired by Google. Specifically, our content is mainly targeted toward US-based audiences. That’s owed mostly due to how high the EPMVs are for US-based traffic – $49 compared to other regions, which would be in the $20s to $30s.

Video Overview

For the time being, we’ll continue to pursue our busy content production schedule for the next month and onward. To best maximize our earnings, I’ve set a goal to publish at least 100 articles per month, which has been going along smoothly. It does take a bit of time before the content does start ranking, anywhere from 6 months to a year. So, it might be a while before we can see the fruits of our labor.

Also, there are other interesting changes from Ezoic, too. They’ve just now launched a new service to their portfolio called, Flickify. It’s a simple tool that enables you to create full videos based on a written article. You could then publish that video, put ads on it, have it ranked independently, and accrue an additional ad revenue stream from there. It’s well worth a try if you already have lots of articles.

Otherwise, I’ll be touching more on last month’s (September) ad revenues, analytics concerning our case study domain, and a lot more besides in this video that you could watch below…

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.

Note that this is the first month we have asked for the Ezoic Premium Fees (currently $2,200) to be taken out before the payout. This helps reduce the international exchange rates if you are constantly converting dollars to pay Ezoic Premium Fees, ask your Publisher Success Manager about this option if it might help save you money to.

Here you can see the payout from Adsense via Ezoic’s mediation tool for £2,057.88 which is converted from $2,377 that was owed.