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Dropping Adsense - Saying Goodbye to $100K Per Year in Easy Income

• potatolicious 18y ago
  Good for him :) It takes balls to just pull all ads off your site. That being said, how in the world does a guy get $100K+ a year from AdSense? My blog got Slashdotted (and reddit'ed) a while back and I think I made <$1 that whole day (while serving some 200K+ views)... Even multiply that by 100x that readership (20M a day?!) wouldn't make the math work...
  • wayne 18y ago
    Quality can be as important as quantity. Slashdot traffic is notoriously bad... people view the content, often using an ad blocker, and then bounce without clicking any ads.
  • deleted 18y ago
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  • netcan 18y ago
    It depends on your readership & your topics. If you are writing constant posts on personal finances: remortgag, consolidating, getting a financial advisor etc. & the ads that get posted are reasonably relevant (very dependant on the industry) & the readers are 'get a cup o coffee & read' type (digg/stumble/slashdot are reportadly click happy 15 second visitors), then you can get a good amount. Its important to think about this from the advertisers perspective. The industries where click costs are high are where a large number of clicks can become substantial sales. Services are a biggie: everywhere from mortgage consultants to plumbers.
  • davidw 18y ago
    The ones that seem to make money often appear to me as the "high income bloggers that blog about making money by blogging about moneymaking blogs and bloggers and how they made money" type of individuals.
  • imp 18y ago
    I was curious also so I ran some numbers: He's the #1 search result for "personal development", which averages 90,500 searches per month from Google. Assuming he receives 60% of those visits, that's 54,300 visits per month. Since it's search traffic, which would be people willing to click and look for info, he might get a CTR of 2%, which is 1,086 clicks per month. The estimated CPC for that term is $1.92, so that is $2,085 per month, or $25,021 per year. Since that's a rough estimate of $25k/year for one search term, I think $100,000 per year is reasonable.
    • wmeredith 18y ago
      A number one ranking on a Google SERP will get you far more than 60% click through. It's usually 90%+. Even if its clearly something different than you were searching for (in the description, etc.) a lot of people just click the first link reflexively. <-- Obviously, that traffic doesn't convert well, but it's interesting.
    • jwesley 18y ago
      Your assumptions on this are off. He may be making $100K per year, but definitely not $25K for one search term. Google takes at least 40-50% of the CPC as rev share. Also, the traffic estimator you used is broad match, meaning it includes every query that somehow includes "personal development" such as "Tony Robbins personal development" or "personal development workshop". Many of these Steve will not rank for, even though he is number 1 for the exact match. I've run a site with similar content and good search rankings that gets around 50% of the traffic of Steve's site (according to Compete), and our AdSense revenue was nowhere close to $100k per year. Even though Steve was using AdSense more aggressively, it makes me wonder how he was able to earn so much. The average earnings per click for us was only 15 cents or so.
      • imp 18y ago
        Thanks for pointing out my mistakes. I forgot about Google's share of the CPC. Duh. I was also misreading Google's traffic estimator. That exact phrase, "personal development" only receives 14,800 searches per month. Big difference.
  • cabalamat 18y ago
    $1 for 200k views is very little. Typical CPM with adsense is between $1 and $10, so for 200k views you might typically expect between $200 and $2000. Having said that, Slashdot readers are more likely than average to use ad-blocking software.
• Jasber 18y ago
  Steve is a great guy and some of his work really resonates with me: - http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/05/how-to-become-an-early-riser/ http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/05/how-to-become-an-ea... - http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep/ http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep/ - http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/08/the-law-of-attraction/ http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/08/the-law-of-attracti... But lately his stuff seems too "out there"--even for me. I fully respect what he does, but his way of life seems too extreme for me.
  • nazgulnarsil 18y ago
    polyphasic sleep is potentially revolutionary. I heavily suggest it for those that want to do their own startup but can't break away from their job. Get a part time job, go polyphasic. You'll suddenly have plenty of time to work on your own stuff, work part-time, and still have a social life.
    • palish 18y ago
      But it seems like you'll also go nuts. If you impose a polyphasic sleep schedule on yourself, you must follow it without fail. And that means a 15-minute nap every N hours. It doesn't matter if you're watching a movie, or out with friends, or "in the flow". If you slip up, the whole sleep pattern comes crashing down. So not many people have that much discipline, for one. But even if you do, it doesn't seem possible for a human to work 100% of the time. Each time I've tried, I simply end up wasting time rather than using it -- e.g. I'll stare at my computer screen for awhile thinking, try some minor change that doesn't work, then repeat the cycle over for a couple hours. And the next day, my work has often proved to be shoddy at best when I was forcing myself to work. On the other hand, I've had plenty of experiences that went like: There's a bug to fix. Can't seem to fix it. Go to bed. Wake up refreshed. Spot the bug in ten minutes. That seems pretty valuable as a time saver, so it doesn't seem wise to sacrifice your "unwind" time lightly. I'm sorry. I don't mean to sound like I'm coming down on you. I'm merely trying to point out that, in the end, polyphasic sleep seems like a form of masochism -- and perhaps that's why Steve himself stopped doing it.
• josefresco 18y ago
  Keep the AdSense, donate the money to charity. Asshat.
  • breck 18y ago
    Not a bad idea. No need for the second comment.
  • swombat 18y ago
    If the AdSense was something, as he says on his site, that made him feel uncomfortable about his own website and his self-image, then that suggestion is dumb. It's a bit like telling someone who's trying to stop being a prostitute: "Keep whoring, donate the proceeds to charity." You're the asshat, my friend.
  • run4yourlives 18y ago
    Until you can safely scratch $100K from you income, you can't call people who do asshats.
    • jrockway 18y ago
      It appears that he just did.
  • lacker 18y ago
    Remember that the money is coming from somewhere, from whoever the advertisers are making money from. In Steve's case the money probably eventually comes from suckers for get-rich-quick schemes. So it's not clear that by accepting that money and giving it to charity, the world would actually be a better place.
• mhb 18y ago
  Interesting that he has a donation link on the sidebar.
• nazgulnarsil 18y ago
  He doesn't give a strong reason for getting rid of the ads other than that they aren't directly for products he endorses. It's nice that he makes so much money that he can afford to have principles. :P
• cbrinker 18y ago
  Never heard of the guy before. I checked out his bio on Wikipedia and it says this: "After being arrested for grand theft in Sacramento, CA and given 60 hours of community service, Steve claims that this was the impetus he needed to turn his life around. He claims to have earned two college degrees in three semesters from California State University, Northridge - he says that he partly achieved this by attending a college that was generous in awarding advanced placement credits for courses he had taken in high school, thus reducing his required course." The citation links to his article where he claims he did 30-40 units per semester and no summer school. I don't know, that sounds pretty ridiculous to me. Very hard for me to believe he earned 2 degrees in 3 semester on technical subjets of mathematics and comp sci.
  • sireat 18y ago
    I am a little dubious myself, but it seems doable, considering a couple factors: Steve was going to UC Berkeley before he got popped for that theft charge, CSUN is quite a bit lower on the pecking order than UCB (no offense any CSUN graduates!) Second factor is that if you don't do any partying, girl/boy chasing, don't have to take care of your family, don't have to hold a job, you have plenty of time to do a double/triple load of studying. Thing is most of us don't want to do that...
  • jodrellblank 18y ago
    Never heard of you before. I checked your bio on Wikipedia and you don't have one. Sounds pretty ridiculous to me. Very hard for me to believe you're even a real person. Casting aspersions on his character? Why? It's very hard for me to believe people can know enough to earn a Nobel Prize for Physics, but they do. See: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/12/rules-are-no-obstacles-for-committed-people/ http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/12/rules-are-no-obstac... for how he did it.
    • omouse 18y ago
      Sometimes the character of a person casts doubt on what they say. Have you never heard the story of the boy who cried wolf?
    • 18y ago
• debt 18y ago
  Complete moron.
• noonespecial 18y ago
  I like Steve and have found some of his postings in the past quite inspirational. I found a large part of me responding "you go Steve" while reading this. It wasn't quite enough, though, to silence the part of me that was responding "you elitist prick" when reading things like "Given the choice between having an extra $100K per year of free money vs. becoming the kind of person who can kill off that much income without fear or worry...". Many people have lost their livelihood by losing a small portion of this amount of "free money" and are facing dire economic circumstances in their lives. This blog post may just be 6 months too late considering the current world economic status. Steve usually blogs "way out there" and I suppose that sometimes when you reach hard, you miss the mark. I hope he keeps going, I just thought this one was a miss.
  • arien 18y ago
    Yeah, I was kinda feeling the same way. I mean it's his blog and can do whatever he wants about it, but things like this aren't too nice to read in some circumstances.
    • noonespecial 18y ago
      The only thing I find more socially awkward than someone bragging to me about how much money they are making is someone bragging to me about how much money they could be making and are choosing not to.
• pchristensen 18y ago
  At one point about a year ago, he said he was making $40,000 a month, so he's still making tons. Plus, now he's got more real estate for higher paying display or joint venture ads that he can sell directly because of the scale of his traffic.
• weegee 18y ago
  how about keeping adsense and give the entire amount to charity? sheesh.
  • weegee 18y ago
    amazing this comment gets voted down.
• Angostura 18y ago
  Summary: Turning to a wholey raw vegan diet appears to have affected my cognition adversely.