Over the past several months, we’ve experienced a rare and unprecedented stagnation in the display ads market that has certainly pinched many fellow publishers out there. This is something that has impacted countless publishers across all niches, irrespective of which ad network provider they’re monetizing with. As of July 2023, our case study domain’s monthly ad revenues have continued to decline to $10,126.
This is on top of persistent and gradual drops in monthly ad revenues that we’ve noted for our case study domain… $11,182 in June, $13,412 in May, $12,857 in April, $14,011 in March, and so on. No doubt, this is a lot lower than the near-$20,000 in monthly ad earnings that we raked in during our peak. If you want to learn more, check out that handy Revenue Reports tab up top to find a month-by-month analysis.
Looking more intensely at the data from Ezoic, our ad network provider of choice, our case study domain hence saw a roughly 12% drop in ad revenues compared to June 2023. However, on the flip side, our case study domain otherwise experienced a bounce in site traffic. Compared to June, July 2023 saw a healthy (roughly) 14% and 12% rise in visits and ‘engaged’ pageviews, with only a small 3% drop in pageviews.
So then, despite over 377,000 page visits, nearly 478,000 pageviews, and more than 252,000 ‘engaged’ pageviews throughout July 2023, why did we notice a huge 12% drop in monthly ad revenues? Well, the answer lies with the EPMVs (earnings per thousand visitors), which recorded a very steep 24% decline in July 2023. To understand this more clearly, we’ll have to refer to Ezoic’s Online Ad Revenue Index.
| July 2023 Ad Revenue From Ezoic | ||
|---|---|---|
| Revenue (Total) | $10,126 | |
| Traffic | Visits | 377,305 |
| Pageviews | 477,740 | |
| Engaged Pageviews | 252,423 | |
| ePMV (Earnings Per Thousand Visitors) | $26.79 | |
Looking More Closely At The Index
Ezoic’s Ad Revenue Index is a clever metric that broadly shows us how much money is flowing around in the digital ads market. While the data in the index might be specific to Ezoic, it does echo similar sentiments with other popular ad network providers, as well. Simply put; the higher the index goes, this means that more money is being spent on ads. That also translates to higher earnings for publishers.
Usually, Ezoic’s Ad Revenue Index – as is a literal translation of the ad market in the real world – follows a familiar trend… The ad market cools down in the early months of the year, before rising slowly as we get into the summer months. Then, it’ll always peak by the end of the year, owing to advertisers spending big on holiday and Christmas ads. Once that’s over, it sharply drops in January, and the cycle continues.
Even during the pandemic, the index remained cyclical and predictable, always on time. However, when mid-2022 came, we never saw that spike toward the end of the year. Now that we’re in 2023, the index has remained exceptionally and unusually flat, with the global ad market stagnating to a halt. In 2023 so far, July saw the Ad Revenue Index having dropped to a score of 33, lower than even back in January.
This then, is the reason why July 2023’s EPMVs for our case study domain fell to an average of $26.79. It’s far below the mid to high-$30s that we notched in prior months. Sadly, this is a factor that publishers like you and I can’t control. With that being said, there are ways to try and mitigate such losses by maximizing and optimizing your ad revenues, which you can learn more about in my Ezoic display ads training course.
Min-Maxing Our Monthly Ad Revenues
That aforementioned training course goes into detail about my own experiences in setting up a website, trying to capture site traffic, then monetizing it, and more. Nevertheless, if a paid training course isn’t an expense that you can look at for now, there are plenty of free resources here, too. You’ll find my detailed guide on making money online from content creation websites, and Ezoic even has a free SEO guide eBook.
Here, you’ll find our in-depth explainers on stuff like how to do keyword research, our list of the best free keyword research tools, and our on-page SEO checklist. Besides that, we’ve gone to town with discussing more about Ezoic itself, including the Ezoic ad revenue guarantee program, then how to get started with monetizing your site on Ezoic, as well as how to optimize Ezoic for maximum ad revenue, and more.
With these additional learnings and insights, you can at least prepare yourself (and your site) and be far better off when unexpected things like these happen… Such as how the display ads market basically falls off a cliff as of late, which no one at our level can influence. Another neat little min-max thing that we’ve done for our case study domain is join Ezoic’s premium program, to help maximise gains a bit more.
As you can see here, our July 2023’s monthly ad earnings are broken into three segments. The bulk of its revenues (around $7,684) came from Ezoic’s ad partners. Meanwhile, we’re also using Ezoic’s mediation feature, allowing us to monetize our site alongside AdSense, netting another (roughly) $1,040. Although the premium program means that we’re paying Ezoic a bit upfront, we earned more in total ($1,401).
Preparing For The Incoming Months
July 2023 is our case study domain’s 34th straight month of being monetized mainly through Ezoic. In all that time, it was never a challenge to achieve mid to high-$30s in EPMVs. There were some months that we broke past into the $40s range. This recent drop did hit us pretty hard, as it would’ve for a lot of you, as well. It’s even more bleak when you compare our July 2023 ad revenues with that of July 2022.
Compared to last year, our monthly ad revenues declined by a massive 43%. The EPMVs too, were down by 26% year-on-year. Granted, there were other external factors that contributed to this besides the ads market. Google’s ever-sporadic and often-brutal Core search engine algorithm updates had downgraded our case study domain in the search results. This meant that fewer people were clicking on our site.
The recent updates since around Q4 2022 have severely impacted our case study domain. This is also why you’re seeing that (approx.) 23%, 21%, and 23% drop in page visits, pageviews, and engaged pageviews, respectively (YoY). Back in July 2022, we had days when our daily 24-hour ad revenues broke through the $600s threshold. Even on normal days, we were still earning mid to high-$500s every single day in ads.
But as of now, in July 2023, most days saw us earning 24-hour daily ad revenues in the low to mid-$300s range. It rarely went into the high-$300s mark, and not once did our case study domain manage to earn any higher than $400 in a day over the last month. On the bright side, we did try to diversify our income as of late, by embedding ads in our long-form blog posts, monetized through Ezoic’s Humix service.
Video Overview (& Future Plans)
For those who are new here, Humix is basically Ezoic’s version of YouTube. There, you can host videos to show to your audience. And, your site would also show – through Humix – relevant videos made by other creators, too. Between videos made by us, whether embedded onto our case study domain or shared on other websites, as well as the videos made by other creators, July 2023 saw us earning an extra $382.
While it pales in comparison to $10,000+ from earlier, any additional ad revenues are welcomed. When paired with Ezoic’s Flickify service, which easily and intuitively lets you convert your written articles into videos, ad earnings atop video playback (such as Humix) is a no-brainer. Besides diversifying my income stream, it’s also crucial that in the coming weeks, I’ll be looking at the general site traffic as a whole.
Although I (and neither can any publisher) influence the currently-depressed display ads market, I can at least work on upping the pageviews and visits, by building and maximizing additional site traffic. For the most part, my near-future plans continue to revolve around creating additional content. However, I’m also in the process of putting our content refresh process for decaying and old content into hyperdrive.
Besides that, I’m also looking into what could be done with clever internal and external linking strategies, if it means being able to lead more traffic to our case study domain. Beyond that, just a lot more with ad optimizations here and there, which you can learn more about in that training course, too. If you’d like to learn more about our July 2023 ad revenues in TL;DR form, you could also check out this video, too…
