There’s still no clear reprieve for publishers and bloggers who continue to lose out on valuable site traffic owing to Google’s latest search engine algorithm updates and changes, and for our case study domain as well, it’s been looking pretty bleak, to say the least. As of the end of January 2024, undoubtedly made worse by the oftentimes and usually eye-watering January RPMs, earned us just $1,838 in ad revenues.
Data suggests red across the board, with a month-on-month ad revenue decrease of around 32.39% when compared to December ($1,838 vs $2,721), a 31.20% dip in EPMVs (aka ‘earnings per thousand visitors‘ – which we, as publishers, can’t really control) to $15.02, not to mention the 1.73% drop in our page visits (~122,000), 3.80% drop in pageviews (~143,000) and 3.53% plummet in engaged pageviews (~78,000).
As is expected, the slight decrease in monthly site traffic wouldn’t be nearly as punishing if the EPMVs were not as low as they are now, but then again, that’s always been the case with January EPMVs or RPMs, so it’s not a huge surprise. The trend, which you can preview on Ezoic’s (our ad network provider of choice) Ad Revenue Index, so if this trend continues, we can hope for improved EPMVs in the coming months.
The graphs look even worse when you compare January 2024’s and December 2023’s daily ad revenues. Where we were able to earn more than $100+ daily on the best days this past December (granted, most days were in the $80s to $90s), when looking at January 2024, not a single day’s ad revenues earned us over $70 or so. In fact, on most days, we’d barely crack past $50 in a whole day’s display ad revenues.
| January 2024 Ad Revenue From Ezoic | ||
|---|---|---|
| Revenue (Total) | $1,838 | |
| Traffic | Visits | 122,430 |
| Pageviews | 142,702 | |
| Engaged Pageviews | 78,119 | |
| ePMV (Earnings Per Thousand Visitors) | $15.02 | |
What To Do & Forging Ahead
With that being said, you can find out more about how we earned in prior months by clicking on the little Revenue Reports tab up top to get a month-by-month update. For us, the best benefit of monetizing our case study domain via Ezoic is that we get to leverage their ‘mediation’ feature, allowing us to monetize alongside other ad network providers, as well as access to their premium tier, which we are a part of.
That aforementioned premium tier ensures that our case study domain could show ads from Ezoic’s crop of higher-paying, premium advertisers – which, in turn, means more ad revenues for us. Be sure to check out our guides on how to optimize Ezoic for maximum ad revenue, and how to get started with Ezoic, to learn how you can maximize your earnings as a publisher. We also have a lot of other guides here, too.
This includes our analysis and tips for making money online from content creation websites, as well as how to do good keyword research, and what are my best free keyword research tools. Between this and our handy on-page SEO checklist and my paid training course to learn additional tips and tricks, you too can navigate all this SEO uncertainty with more confidence. So, what about us – what do we do now?
Well, with Google’s Helpful Content Update (HCU) giving less of a priority to authority and smaller niche sites like our case study domain, our plan moving forward is to go where the traffic is really at right now; community-driven sites. As such, we’re launching a fully-fledged and quite old-school community forum as a subdomain of our case study domain, creating content on that, and seeing where it takes us from there.
I’ll be sure to update you on how that’s going in the coming weeks and months, but for now, check out this video overview down below to learn more about our abysmal January 2024 ad revenues, and what we’re planning to do to stem that downwards tide…
