For the first time in a long time, our case study domain finally clocked in a month-on-month increase in monthly ad revenues, now up ever so slightly compared to January 2024 (~$1,838), having netted us a modest $2,001. If you’re curious to know how we got here, check out the Revenue Reports tab up top to take a closer look at how our case study domain has been doing month by month, since we started this site more than 40 months ago.
Although, while it was an increase in monthly ad revenues (despite a shorter month), this is mainly due to the rise in EPMVs (earnings per thousand visitors), up from about $15 back in January, now averaging at $17.33 this past February. This is something that we, as publishers, can’t really control. This, therefore, offsets the declining traffic across the board; ~110,000 page visits, ~130,000 pageviews, and another ~72,000 ‘engaged’ pageviews.
| February 2024 Ad Revenue From Ezoic | ||
|---|---|---|
| Revenue (Total) | $2,001 | |
| Traffic | Visits | 110,737 |
| Pageviews | 129,959 | |
| Engaged Pageviews | 72,800 | |
| ePMV (Earnings Per Thousand Visitors) | $17.33 | |
That’s a roughly 8-10% decrease. Thankfully, in these difficult times – not with SEO undergoing a radical change if you’re heavily reliant on Google – we’re able to somewhat offset this thanks to our preferred ad network provider, Ezoic. We’ve been using their mediation feature when monetizing with display ads on our case study domain, and that allows us to monetize alongside other ad providers if they pay us more, earning us ~$287 in February.
This is in addition to Ezoic’s premium program, which we’re a part of and have to pay upfront monthly for, which then gains us access to Ezoic’s high-paying, premium advertisers. This earns us an additional ~$280, on top of the ~$1,434 that we earn from Ezoic’s regular advertisers. If you want to learn more, check out our guides on how to optimize Ezoic for maximum ad revenue as a publisher, and how to get started with monetizing on Ezoic, too.
What Comes Next
Moreover, we have a lot of free guides, like our insights on making money online from content creation websites, as well as how to do good keyword research, and what are the best free keyword research tools out there, on top of our handy on-page SEO checklist. If you want to, you could even attend my paid training course for additional tips and tricks. Since our case study domain was monetized, it earned well over $350,000, which is impressive.
The biggest reason why our case study domain fell off hard since then, was the implementation of Google’s new Helpful Content Update (HCU) in September 2023, which massively impacted how their ubiquitous search engine algorithms ranks sites. This threw all our SEO learnings and optimizations out the window, and those pages that our case study domain handily got into the first page on Google back in the day, have been booted further down.
Proof of this is comparing our February 2024 metrics with February 2023. Our case study domain saw a gigantic 84.19% decline in monthly ad revenues, a 55.62% drop in EPMVs (this is, once again, out of our hands), a 64.38% dip in page visits, a 67.22% decrease in pageviews, and 66.71% downturn in engaged pageviews. It’s not just us either, as many other publishers out there, especially those that operate niche sites, have been hugely impacted, too.
We’ve also made drastic changes around what’s been going on lately, too. Mainly, we’ve stopped creating fresh content on our case study domain, as our content isn’t ranking well past Google’s September 2023 HCU updates, and we’ve focused on optimizations elsewhere. This includes doing content refresh, creating author profiles (this helps with Google’s EEAT), looking at how display ads are showing up, Core Web Vitals, UI optimizations, etc.
Video Overview
Additionally, we’ve been creating Q&A style content (since Google prioritizes user-generated content more now), and we’ve even created an entire forum and attached that as a subdomain to the main case study domain (since Google is, once again, focusing mainly on user or community-generated content), as well as moving some of our content from the case study domain, onto a new domain (assuming that Google’s put a HCU classifier on us).
For now, it’s too early to tell whether these changes, particularly the latter, would prove successful or otherwise, but whatever happens, we’ll be sure to keep you up to date here. Regardless, if you have any questions, feel free to drop one in the Ask Me section of our site here, and I’ll do my best to answer them. Or, for further details and insights into our February 2024 ad revenues, in addition to here, check out our in-depth video overview below…
