Sometimes even I do dumb things

November 29th, 2007 by Chris

My second most popular content site is my survival site.

I get really decent eCPMs from Adsense with it, especially this time of year, because there are a lot of outdoor retailers who do typical Christmas advertising. Yesterday was one of the best normal days ever for Adsense with it in fact, I saw normal days because abnormal days when I was on the frontpage of Digg or in USA Today, etc, were of course so high in traffic that earnings were way up.

I’ve had this site since 2001 and one of the main draws on it, responsible for getting me tons of links and media mentions like the aforementioned ones above, is the quiz. It features 21 questions and a snarky Sergeant who insults the quiz takers both before, during, and after the quiz. One of the main reasons I made this quiz was to increase pageviews per visitor by making everyone who takes the quiz generate atleast an additional 21 page views. It works beautifully for that purpose and so makes up half of all pages view on the site (not counting the forum).

However, here is the dumb thing, I’ve only ever run 1 banner ad on the page, despite it being such a large portion of my page views. Since 2001, just 1 banner ad. How much money have I left on the table? Who knows, but I did just now add a new footer Adsense ad. It’ll be interesting to see how much this ad position makes me, but I’d guess it could almost do as much as $1000 per month. Wish I had thought to do that sooner.

Let this be a lesson for those of you like me with many different sites, be constantly reviewing them for better ways to monetize them.

Posted in: Ad Networks » by: Chris