Lately, there’s been a general slump in online display ads spending, as advertisers aim to tighten up their wallets, and this can only mean one thing for publishers… With a weaker market and demand for display ads, the once prosperous ad earnings that we’ve previously enjoyed aren’t as attractive now. But, this isn’t to say that it’s catastrophic, as our case study domain’s May 2023 ad revenues of $13,412 show.
That alone is higher than last month’s (April 2023) $12,857 monthly ad revenues. Not to mention, the ad revenues that our case study domain earned in January 2023 ($11,944) and February 2023 ($12,055). It’s not yet breached past our recent peak of $14,011 in monthly ad revenues that was notched in March 2023. For a more detailed month-by-month breakdown, go to our Revenue Reports page to learn more.
So, what’s changed between April and May to justify that roughly 4.32% increase in monthly ad revenue, then? Well, the fairly low EPMVs (which is becoming a common sight among other publishers, not just us or those monetizing within the Ezoic ecosystem), still remain. May 2023’s EPMVs (earnings per thousand visitors) are actually lower than April’s figure, dropping by 0.68% to a lowly average of $33.59.
However, what’s made the biggest difference to that increase in monthly ad revenue is the improvement in our case study domain’s traffic. Throughout May 2023, we recorded over 399,000 page visits, and nearly 622,000 page views, and more than 271,000 of the latter are classed as ‘engaged’ pageviews. This marks a respectable approximately 5.03%, 25.05%, and 5.39% increase across the board, respectively.
How Can You Replicate This?
| May 2023 Ad Revenue From Ezoic | ||
|---|---|---|
| Revenue (Total) | $13,412 | |
| Traffic | Visits | 399,279 |
| Pageviews | 621,985 | |
| Engaged Pageviews | 271,176 | |
| ePMV (Earnings Per Thousand Visitors) | $33.59 | |
If you, a fellow publisher, would like to learn more about how you too can capture a lot of traffic for your website and grow it organically with display ads, this is the best site for you. Over the years, our site here has been evolving with a myriad of free resources, walkthroughs, and market insights that you can check out, including my extensive guide on making money online from content creation websites.
Moreover, there’s Ezoic’s free SEO guide eBook that we’ve linked to here. We also have an abundance of Ezoic-specific guides that you can reference. Such as, our experience with the Ezoic ad revenue guarantee program, or how to get started with monetizing your site on Ezoic, as well as how to optimize Ezoic for maximum ad revenue potential. Plus, we have plenty more general, non-Ezoic guides, as well.
If you’d like to up your SEO game, do check out our on-page SEO checklist, as well as learning how to do some keyword research, or refer to our list of the best free keyword research tools. In addition, I’ve been working on an entire Ezoic and display advertising training course recently, too. Which, you could join and study more from my experiences in setting up a website, capturing traffic, and monetizing it.
While returns from online display ads might’ve slumped over the last few months or so, there’s no better time to be a publisher than right now. There’s enormous potential yet to be tapped and all you need now is the right guidance. Aside from this, being acquainted with a proven strategy, and having a good grasp of the fundamentals of keyword research. And, knowing the tips and tricks to monetizing your site.
Studying The Earnings Data
Speaking of, it’s worth looking a bit deeper into May 2023’s monthly ad revenues for our case study site. For starters, there are the earnings themselves, which are split 3 ways… The bulk of that came from Ezoic’s ad partners (aka advertisers who are showing their ads on Ezoic-partnered publishers like us). The latter accounted for around $9,044 out of that $13,412. Then, there are the earnings from ad mediation.
‘Mediation’ is a unique feature within the Ezoic platform that allows we publishers to monetize alongside another ad provider. So, how does it work? Put simply, when Ezoic determines that this other ad provider would earn you more for a specific ad placeholder based on the ad bidding data, Ezoic will award that ad placeholder to the other ad provider (in our case, it’s AdSense) instead of embedding an Ezoic ad.
This essentially allows publishers to get the most amount of earnings from every ad placeholder possible. As for the aforementioned May (2023) ad revenues, mediation earnings (AdSense) accounted for another roughly $2,557 in returns. Meanwhile, we also have to talk about Ezoic’s premium advertisers, which had earned us the other $1,812. It’s thanks to us having joined Ezoic’s premium membership program.
It’s also worth mentioning that Ezoic’s brought out a new Premium pricing tier, which is more favorable for publishers than before. Previously, we’d have to pay them $2,200 up front every single month, though Ezoic at least followed through with their promise that publishers would earn more than what they’d pay. This time around, their new pricing tier means that I’m only paying Ezoic $900 per month.
New Changes And Developments
Now, going into a bit more detail with that updated Premium program pricing tier… With their new $900-per-month tier, Ezoic estimates that we’d be earning anywhere from $1,440 to $1,800 every month in ads. As we noted earlier, this is exactly what we managed to earn in May 2023, which was $1,812. However, it can be rather confusing, as the actual expected earnings, additional revenue, and fees will vary.
You can watch the embedded video down below, where I’ve gone into further detail with May 2023’s ad revenues, to see what each tier looks like. Ultimately, the fees that you pay (in my case, $900 per month) or how much extra you can expect to earn will depend on how much you’re earning from your regular ad partners on Ezoic. The breakdown of each individual Premium sub-tier is incredibly granular.
But, all that you need to know is that the pricing model is certainly much improved. It’s cheaper, far more accessible, and you get more in return as a publisher. On top of that, the ad revenue figures shown will be less inflated than they were before. In the past, you’d have to deduct $2,200 from the ad revenues to find your actual profit. In this case, we’d only remove $900 – so, we earned roughly $912 in profit.
All in all, if you’ve been put off joining Ezoic’s Premium program prior due to its costly pricing model, it may be a good time to re-consider it now. Additionally, you get other benefits besides higher ad earnings from Ezoic’s premium advertisers. There are numerous other perks, such as access to Ezoic’s suite of tools and features to better help you with maximizing and optimizing your website’s monetization.
Maximising Display Ad Monetisation
Earlier in this monthly revenue report, we mentioned that our case study domain attracted a huge gain in site traffic between May and April 2023. Specifically, we saw a more than 25% increase in pageviews in May. This is an abnormally high increase in pageviews, even compared to previous months. So, how is this so? Well, a major contributor to this is my testing and experimentation with Ezoic’s new ad formats.
In particular, a new ad format and type that publishers could use to show display ads on their site using Ezoic, called ‘Expanded Article Ads’. This is something that only showed up in my Ezoic dashboard about one month ago, and I’ve had it turned on since. What ‘Expanded Article Ads’ does, is it adds a button on your webpage that says, ‘Expand Article’. This only appears once you’ve scrolled far enough down.
On some other sites, you might instead be familiar with similar buttons like “Expand To Show Full Article’, where the rest of the page loads up after pressing that button. By shortening the page that initially loads up and is viewable, this dramatically hastens the loading time per page. On top of that, by clicking on the ‘Expand Article’ button, this gets your reader or site visitors to add another click on the page.
Then, refreshing or reloading the page to insert more ads, such as interstitial ads. This is another way to help buck up your site earnings and EPMVs. Depending on how you see it, this might otherwise be a quick way to inflate your pageview count. After all, we’re only seeing a 5% increase in visits after turning this on. So, it remains to be seen whether this new ad format could really be an effective way to boost your EPMVs.
Ad Market Slowing Us Down?
We mentioned earlier about how advertiser spending in the digital display ad market is slowing down. So, what does that mean? In layman’s terms, this means that advertisers aren’t as liberal about spending big sums of money on display ads and advertising in general as they once used to be. Unfortunately, that will impact earnings for publishers like us, which depend on monetizing our content with display ads.
This isn’t exclusive to Ezoic, either. Other ad providers are suffering from a similar lack of demand and slowness in the market. For visual reference, you can check out Ezoic’s Ad Revenue Index, which tracks the trend in online ad rates. Typically, the chart follows a familiar pattern… There’s a gradual incline and then a huge spike in the Ad Revenue Index by the end of the year, mostly during November and December.
That’s largely due to the encroaching holiday seasons. This is when advertisers are putting massive sums of cash in ad spending to get their goods and services out the door during the holiday sales rush. After that, what will follow is a huge decline leading into January. This is when advertisers pull back on ad spending once the holiday season is over. Average ad rates will then stabilize into February and March, before repeating again.
The cycle has been consistent for many years, at least until recently. Due to global economic uncertainties and the threat of recession, the hardship has forced advertisers to be more conservative with ad spending. Usually, our EPMVs would be around $40 instead of $33 to $34. Had the ad market not been as depressed as they are now, we would’ve been able to earn $19,000 to $20,000 instead of $13,412 for May 2023.
What Are We Doing To Cope?
To help maximize our case study domain’s earnings as much as possible, we’ve also been working toward embedding video-based content alongside the written content. This was made possible with Ezoic’s video hosting and sharing service, Humix. It’s basically Ezoic’s version of YouTube, in a way. It allows publishers to easily create videos, monetize them with the same Ezoic ad technology, and share those videos.
Throughout May 2023, our earnings from Ezoic’s Humix service were around $404. While not substantial, going on top of the aforementioned $13,412 ad revenue figure, it’s nothing to scoff at. That $404 is then divided into 3 ways… 1) videos that you’ve created that appear on your site, 2) videos you’ve created which are then shared on other sites, and 3) videos other publishers created that appear on your site.
This is something that I’m going to invest more time and energy into. Hopefully, I can turn it into a good alternative source of ad revenue besides the written content. And, it’s something you should consider, as well. If you do plan on using Humix, make sure you leverage Ezoic’s Flickify service, too. It’s a feature and tool that could quickly turn all your written articles into fully-edited videos as quickly as possible.
Otherwise, most of my plans for the coming months would be to continue re-investing my ad returns into more content for the case study domain. It’s hard to tell where the ad market is going to, seeing how flat 2023 has been thus far. And, even the end of 2022 wasn’t as explosive as it used to be. For me, I could just about weather the sluggish display ad market and its weak returns, and I hope you can, too.
Video Overview
On the bright side though, I’m thus far pretty happy with the progress on the case study domain, despite the suppressed ad rates and ad market that every publisher around the world is experiencing. It’s certainly not the end of the world, and the ad market will undoubtedly regain its footing any day now. For now, if you need more insights, either hit up your questions on the Ask Me Anything page here.
Or, you could also check out this video overview of our case study site’s May 2023 ad revenues to find out more…
