The general cooling down of the online display ads market has put a damper on pretty much every single publisher out there, including us. June 2023 has come and gone, having netted us ad revenues of $11,182 for the entire month. It might seem like a pretty penny, but it’s a far sight lower than what we’ve managed to bring home in May ($13,412), as well as April ($12,857), and more so back in March ($14,011).
If you want more in-depth month-by-month breakdowns throughout our experience with monetizing our case study domain through Ezoic… (This is our 33rd month on Ezoic, by the way)… You can check out that handy Revenue Reports tab up top. As always, June 2023’s disappointing 14.13% decline in monthly ad revenues compared to May 2023 sees our display ad earnings split three ways, just like before.
Roughly $7,472, the bulk of the ad revenues, was earned through Ezoic’s ad partners. Meanwhile, another $1,579 was thanks to us having joined Ezoic’s premium program, allowing us access to show higher-paying and more lucrative ads from Ezoic’s premium, A-tier advertisers. Aside from that, the remainder, or around $2,135 was earned through Ezoic’s mediation feature, allowing us to monetize alongside AdSense.
If you look at that chart up there, you might’ve noticed that around the 9th of June, there was a massive traffic drop for our case study domain. Looking at this more closely, it equated to an approximately 25% decline in traffic. This, unfortunately, set the trend for the rest of the month, as June continued seeing flatter and gradually plateauing site traffic. Owing to this, we’re now seeing red across the board.
| June 2023 Ad Revenue From Ezoic | ||
|---|---|---|
| Revenue (Total) | $11,182 | |
| Traffic | Visits | 316,552 |
| Pageviews | 471,602 | |
| Engaged Pageviews | 217,266 | |
| ePMV (Earnings Per Thousand Visitors) | $35.33 | |
Looking At The Data
Once the dust has settled, and the entire month’s metrics are accounted for, the whole of June saw a huge 18.00% decline in page visits, an even bigger 22.01% drop in pageviews, and among the latter, there’s also a hefty 17.14% decrease in ‘engaged’ pageviews… When compared to May. Even with the EPMV (earnings per thousand visitors) increasing by 4.71% compared to last month, it’s still not enough to offset this.
This rather cavernous and significant downward trend in site traffic is most likely due to a recent minor Google algorithm update. Alas, this is something that no publisher could truly or easily control. Rather, the best that we can do is to try and adapt to it. This algorithm update has since encouraged us to shift focus on our content creation plans. Therefore, we’ll be spending more time working on content refresh.
That should, hopefully, get us back in Google’s good favor, and perhaps, it might now rank our site much higher and more competitively in the search results. However, there are other variables at play for why ad earnings have been so poor lately. Ezoic’s Ad Revenue Index is an online tool that tracks the performance of the ad market as a whole. This then allows you to compare today’s figures with historical data.
A brief glance will tell you all you need to know… The ad market has been pretty flat for the entire year so far. This amount of stagnation is unprecedented, as commonly, the ad market would spike and correct all throughout the year. Particularly, as shopping and holiday seasons roll around by the end of the year, the ad market oftentimes explodes thanks to high advertiser interest, handing publishers a big cheque.
How Much More Can The Market Fall?
It’s worth bearing in mind that these miserable figures that you see on the Ezoic Ad Revenue Index doesn’t just apply to advertisers monetizing on Ezoic alone. All this data has (and will continue to) impact all other publishers monetizing on other ad network providers, too. There’s simply not a lot of money on the market right now, further dampening growth. Our case study domain’s daily ad revenues paint a bleak picture.
At the start of the month, we were comfortably earning in the low- to mid-$400s in ad revenues every day. However, once that minor Google algorithm update went live, and combined with the suppressed ad market, 10th of June 2023 onward, our 24-hour ad revenues fell first to the high-, then mid- to low-$300s. That’s a loss of around $100 in ad revenue every single day! Nonetheless, we shouldn’t be perturbed by this.
After all, as I’ve stressed before, it’s all about the long-term, not focusing only on month-by-month results. If you want to learn even more beyond the vast trove of resources that we have here, you could also check out my Ezoic display ads training course, where I’ve explained every little variable you need to know about setting up a website, capturing traffic, and thus monetizing it, all from my own experiences.
Other than the course, there are plenty of other free guides here, too. For instance, there’s my detailed and in-depth guide on making money online from content creation websites. Additionally, Ezoic even has a free SEO guide eBook that you could refer to. While you’re there, be sure to also check out our extensive studies on how to do keyword research, the best free keyword research tools, and our on-page SEO checklist.
What’s To Come Next?
But anyway, back to our June earnings… It’s crucial that you take a step back in times like these, and look at the bigger picture. So, with that in mind, let’s look at the year-to-date ad revenues instead, which now encompasses our Ezoic ad revenues from the 1st of January 2023, all the way through to the 30th of June 2023. Following that drop past June 9th, the end of June did bring us to the lowest point of the year.
Still, at least for the first half of 2023 so far, the total ad revenues did net us earnings of around $75,000. So, if you’re keen to match these earnings yourself, check out our Ezoic-specific walkthroughs. This includes our experience with the Ezoic ad revenue guarantee program, as well as learning how to get started with monetizing your site on Ezoic, and how to best optimize Ezoic for maximum ad revenues.
Besides that $75k payday for the first half of the year, our case study domain further brought us nearly 3 million pageviews. Another interesting little insight, courtesy of Ezoic’s Big Data Analytics page, is our case study domain’s desktop-to-mobile split. This basically tells you how much of your audience is visiting and experiencing your site using a mobile device (smartphone), a tablet, or a desktop PC.
In our case, a huge chunk of our audience – just over 70% of which – is visiting our case study domain with a mobile device. Different devices entail varying ad options and formats. Not to mention, how your visitors interact with your site also differs. As such, it’s worth bearing this in mind when you’re setting up your site. If your audience is mostly on mobile, ensure that you’re optimizing your site for tinier phone screens.
Where Will Our Case Study Domain Go Next?
Oh, and something else that we’ve been exploring lately is Ezoic’s Humix service. You can practically think of it as Ezoic’s version of YouTube. With this service, you can host videos on Humix, and monetize them on Ezoic’s ad network. By embedding these videos (and the ads that go on top of them) onto a webpage, it’s a great alternative source of income. In addition, they can provide additional content for your audience.
Ezoic even makes the process of creating videos much easier, with their Flickify service. This video creation tool essentially allows you to turn written articles or blog posts into videos, which you can then polish with some editing magic. Throughout the year so far (January to June 2023), using Humix alone has earned us an additional $2,478 in extra ad revenues. So, there’s some good money to be found there.
You might be wondering then… What’s next for us? What are we planning to do about these low earnings from display ads, and how are we adjusting our content creation process? For the most part, the work that we’re doing on the case study domain remains the same. Although, we are optimizing every little bit that we can. For starters, we’re pushing more and more on maximizing and perfecting our E-E-A-T.
On top of that, we’re looking at improving the authority of our site, as well as spending more time building links to more sites. Backlinking is not something that we’ve done so much in the past, but it might be that crucial missing link to unlock more growth. Otherwise, our content creation workflow remains the same, as we’re still cranking out at least 100 or so long-form, and SEO-optimised articles every single month.
Video Overview
If you’d like to learn even more about our June 2023 ad revenues, check out this video overview below…
