Youtube-eBay-Amazon Mashup Results and Thoughts

January 21, 2008 by

Ever since I started using Mark’s script for a Youtube eBay Amazon Mashup site, I’ve been meaning to do this post. I don’t have much for results, but I do have my share of thoughts. If you were a reader when I started using it, you’ll know that I modified the script to display Adsense’s Youtube video spots instead of just random Youtube spots. (You can Download that version of the YouTube eBay Amazon Mashup script)

The only true stats that I can give you are the stats on those spots. In the roughly 3 months that I’ve been running the script, I’ve managed less than 10 clicks on just over 2000 views. For those of you that are as mathematically challenged as I am, that’s a CTR% of about .42%. Not exactly a stellar performance. While I don’t track the eBay and Amazon hits from these sites, I’m fairly certain that I haven’t made any sales through those sites. Again, not exactly stellar.

In all fairness to the script, I haven’t done any sort of marketing for these sites. I have no intention of leaving them with this script and would like to develop them into sites at some point, but just haven’t had the time. I threw the script up as a “holder” that hopefully will help them get indexed easier and quicker when I do develop them. And it does work pretty well for that. They certainly haven’t attained hundreds of links in the search engines but each has somewhere between 10 and 20. That’s pretty good. Especially for what is essentially a parked domain. And it isn’t nearly as spammy as those ad scraping parking pages that you see elsewhere. I like that.

Overall, I’m happy with the script. It’s accomplished the goals I set for it. Mark did a wonderful job of making it really easy to implement, and the script itself is easy enough to understand that I was able to modify it to add the YouTube Adsense spots. If you’re looking for a “parking” spot for your unused domains, you can do much worse than the YouTube eBay Adsense mashup script.

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Adsense is on Fire!

December 6, 2007 by

I expected December to be better than last month for adsense, but I never expected this.  Due to a couple of really hot posts that Google seems to really like and some changes to my Adsense positioning, I’m on track to exceed my Adsense earnings from November within the first week of December.  In fact, if it keeps up like this, it’s possible that my Adsense earnings from December could exceed my total earnings for November.

How’s that for an increase in earnings? Heck Yeah!

So, I mentioned that I have a couple of hot, hot posts, but what did I change that makes my earnings so much better?  Well, as most frequent visitors are likely aware, my adsense runs as a skyscraper on the left side of the blog.  That’s great and it performs reasonably well.  However, I thought I’d do a little experimenting to see if I couldn’t add a little extra oomph to my earnings on the hotter posts.  And boy howdy did it work.  All I did was add a block of adsense directly into the post.  Nothing fancy and not in any particular size (although I favor the 250X250 block).  That’s it.  One little addition/change.  And my earnings skyrocketed.

If you run Adsense on your blog, I strongly suggest that you try adding a block of adsense into your most popular search engine posts.  I don’t like adding it to my most popular reader posts because I think it gets in the way of the post, but the posts that the search engines love are fair game. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised with how it works for you.  I might even try throwing in some affiliate links in those boxes to see what happens.

I’m using the WPAds plugin to do my adserving.

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Online Ad Revenue Hits New High

October 5, 2007 by

In case you missed it, the IAB announced that the online ad revenue for the second quarter of 2007 hit a new high.  Over 5 billion dollars.  Wow.  Some quick math will point out that we should be looking for a 20 billion dollar year in ad revenues online.  That’s impressive.

HipMojo points out that the big dog of the online ad game, Google, accounts for over 40% of the U.S. Online Ad revenue.  That also is impressive.  What’s more impressive, and I think more than a few people either missed it or glossed over it is the fact that performance revenue increased the gap between it and cpm (impressions) revenue.

What does that mean for you and me?  If we’re counting on Adsense, Adbright, or any other impression ads to pick up or sustain their levels, we better start counting elsewhere.  PPC (pay per click) advertising seems to still be rising, but I would guess that the large increase to the performance revenue is most likely due to affiliate sales.

So, how much affiliate work do you do?  I’d say you’ll be doing more in the next few months.  I know I’ll be focusing on getting my affiliate work in gear.  I’ve been doing poorly in that particular area so I have a lot of work to do.

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