How is Your Ad Revenue?

February 4, 2009

Year on year our ad revenue continues to grow – albeit the growth in January was the slowest to date. The ad revenue per site is still up, but the earnings per thousand page views is down and on some sites quite a bit down.

During last year I decided that we should move away from being completely reliant on travel websites and build some financial sites and food sites. Fairly easy stuff for me to write as I have worked in one of those areas previously, and I do like to eat. My thoughts at the time had nothing to do with the credit crunch – I had no idea that would be so bad. I was thinking of the price of oil.

I have followed the crazy people that write about peak oil for the last few years and during last year when oil went past $140 I thought people are not going to travel as much and companies are going to go out of business – so less ad money in this area.

In a way I was right – some did go out of business – bye bye Zoom – but that was just normal day to day business. Now oil is down to about $40 and I am still glad we built some financial sites. The ad revenue on them is not quite around the projections – but it has more than made up for the loss in the CPM in the travel sites. And the food sites are on the long finger, have the domains, not the time.

One upside – the cost of Adwords ads has also fallen, though I still see some crazy prices for some keyword terms, hotels, solicitors, and car hire for example.

So tell me – How is your ad revenue?