My ISP Dreamhost tweeted about Google AdSense recently.
It hit a nerve with me.
How’s your traffic?
I’m guessing your website needs to be getting at least 400 users per day to make money with AdSense. Because that’s how SoccerMovieMom.com qualified for an AdSense account in the first place. At the time, my site was pretty new and getting maybe 10 hits per day. But Dreamhost announced SoccerMovieMom.com in its monthly newsletter, and suddenly my site had more than 400 hits per day for about 2-3 days. My AdSense account was immediately activated, I assume by an algorithm.
Which tells you that Google AdSense knew 5 years ago that 400 hits was some kind of threshold for accepting you as a publisher, so that both sides would make money.
Unfortunately, since that little peak, SoccerMovieMom.com has grown a little but still only sees 20-40 users per day. However, it gets pretty good engagement – the average engagement for the last 30 days was 50 seconds, and the site has a very low bounce rate.
But even though SoccerMovieMom.com gets 1,000 page views in a month, it only earns money if someone clicks on an ad, and a click is only worth a fraction of a cent.
That seems a little unfair to me, as the advertisers are getting exposure on my site. It would be nice if AdSense paid for the impressions, not just the clicks. But since it was the Google Search engine that brought people to the site in the first place, Google probably feels it already did the bulk of the work.
The Google AdSense partner team says the solution is to post more ads, so you may have noticed that I configured the site to generate more ads than the 1-2 per page I had set. I’ll see if that helps.
The plain facts
So for my last post of 2021, I just wanted to let people know that you have to have 10x my level of traffic for Google AdSense to pay off. All those people who write about making money off the internet — I think I’ve only seen one article mention the plain facts I am disclosing here.
Obviously SoccerMovieMom.com is a labor of love and not for monetary rewards.
Note that Google requires you to have earned at least $100 before they will write you a check. I’m thinking that I will close my account once I get there. Assuming of course that Google doesn’t terminate me for writing this article.
