[theforum] Google ads

[David Kaufman]

please pardon my HTML email but the table below required a fixed-width font...

William Anderson <neuro at well.com> wrote:
> Madhu Menon wrote:
>> Hi all.
>> 
>> How are the google ads on beo working? Are they getting us any
>> serious money?


i wouldn't call it "serious" money... but a nice modest, steady, and, more importantly, steadily *increasing* revenue stream.  at around $30-40 per month for May and June, it looked like it would cover the cost of hosting the ServerMatrix box, which is nice.  and July and August seem to have done even better, which is *quite* nice :-)

but we haven't received a payment from them just yet.  according to their FAQ, at http://www.google.com/adsense/faq#payments4 we are supposed to be mailed a check "approximately 30 days after the end of each calendar month that Google ads are running on your site [...] if your earned balance is US $100 or more".  We didn't break the $100 till July 9th, so by my calculations, 30 days after July 31st which is like, next week, we should receive our first check.  we did get a thirty-something dollar check from Cafepress last month, as well.

> I was thinking a regular report (weekly? fortnightly? monthly at
> least!) would be useful - not necessarily the day by day breakdowns,
> but just that month's CTR and revenue, and the total accrued thus far
> would be cool. 

that's an excellent idea.  in fact it seems to me that, in the interests of transparency, i should not only publish the Google AdSense response rates and earnings, but also the Cafepress monthly sales & commission info, and donations.  

Google AdSense Performance on browsers.evolt.org:

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Year     Month   Page Views    Clicks    CTR      ECPM    Earnings    YTD Earnings
2004     May       113753       348     0.300%   $0.26    $30.67        $30.67
2004     June      170205       464     0.305%    0.27     51.78         82.45
2004     July      170067       632     0.295%    0.25     83.91        166.36
2004     August    118245       397     0.300%    0.26     55.52        221.88


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can anyone think of any reason that i *shouldn't* just go ahead post an updated report (similar to the above) monthly, as an article on weo? 

-dave