December 2007 Adsense Earnings and 2007 Overall Earnings.

I had said in a previous post that there was a possibility that I had been 'smart priced'. Well, I have had a closer look at my Stats (which I should have done in the first place) - and I am now certain that it is only the CTR that has dropped on my main web site, with my earnings per click staying fairly constant...

So even though my eCPM is down significantly from what it was in September 2007, I am still earning more or less the same amount per click. The reduced CTR could be due to any number of factors, the most likely being that there are simply not as many well targeted adverts on many of my pages compared to September 2007. This could be due to the 'downturn' in the global economy perhaps??

It is hard for me to check what adverts are appearing on my web site for any parts of the world other than the UK and Republic of Ireland - so it is hard to know. But as far as the UK and Ireland go - there does not seem to have been a huge change..

Adsense Earnings for December 2007 are $519 - my worst month since April 2007, although December is traditionally not very good for me as I do not have any really good Christmas Wallpapers.

Adsense Earnings over the entire 2007 year are $6,992 the VAST majority being earned from 336x280 adsense units - with a small amount from Adsense For Search, and Google Referrals .

Earnings for selling hi-res photos in 2007 are approx $220 (a bit down on last year), and as I said in a previous post it is probably not worth all the hassle..

Earnings from all other stuff that I have tried (CPA / Affiliate stuff etc) - amounts to pretty much ZERO. So while I may grumble form time to time about how poor Adsense can be - it is still far and away my biggest earner AND takes up very little of my time!

Here are visits for the 2007 year for irishviews.com (approx 400,000):-



Ignore the spike which was caused by an ill considered javascript on my site. But overall traffic has been increasing quite significantly over the year as I have added more photos an improved the navigation on the site.

Here are visits for 2007 for irishmyspace.com (approx 73,000):-

The spike near the start was caused by Saint Patricks Day what with my site being 'Irish' and what have you.. I have put very little effort into irishmyspace.com this year - hence why the traffic has not increased overall during the year.

I would also give you a graph of visits for ireland-screensavers.com - but I somehow seem to have messed up the Google analytics code on that site. But very approximately it got 13,000 visits over the year.

Since I started my money from photos blog in June 2007 - it has made me practically no money at all - and only brought in modest amounts of direct traffic to my main web sites - but apparently there are lots of less tangible benefits to having a blog! I am still not sure it is worth all the time and effort, but having said that, I do quite enjoy keeping it up to date... here is the graph:-


Ignore the bit which shows ZERO visits for a few days, as I had changed the Blogger template and forgot to include the Analytics code... But since it started in June - it has had approx 6,000 visits. I tried Adsense on it for a while - but took it back off again - as it is generally accepted that it does not work very well on blogs, and I did not to risk getting 'smart priced' for the sake of approx $10 per month! I will be looking into other ways of making decent earnings form this blog in 2008, so stay tuned!

All the above stats were taken from Google Analytics - which is quite 'conservative' in the figures it quotes.

If you want to see a more 'optimistic' version of these stats from Quantcast, Click here.

So to recap - Adsense Earnings for 2007 by month (In US Dollars):-

Jan 2007 - 215
Feb 2007 - 271
Mar 2007 - 377
Apr 2007 - 375
May 2007 - 525
June 2007 - 524
July 2007 - 755
Aug 2007 - 811
Sep 2007 -1091
Oct 2007 - 668
Nov 2007 - 815
Dec 2007 - 519

Overall 2007 earnings from my main photo related web sites were approx $7212 (US Dollars).

But in case anyone thinks this is an easy way to make money I have to point out that the large number of hours invested in my web sites means that I not exactly earning huge dollars per hour!
NB - My outgoings for the year for hosting etc were in the region of $120.

Most of my earnings are due to 'SEO' - and I thoroughly recommend the Search Engine Optimization For Dummies book which taught me most of what I know about Search Engine Optimization, and if you want to keep constantly up to date with the latest SEO techniques, SEObook also comes highly recommended.....