So it turns out that becoming famous is quite simple – just make up some stuff about the end of the world, tap into a little bit of hysteria, and write a little bit on the internet here and there. But can google make you rich?
I had a popular post last week. As in here’s the before bull worker chart – [flatline], and here’s the after bull worker chart [fireworks]. For you statistic-hungry types that equates to a 1500% increase in site visits compared to the previous months, and rather than the steady stream of people I cajole into reading my nonsense from facebook and so forth, it was a few search engines saying that I had the best answer to a specific question. The post had a short lived shelf life- “is the world ending tomorrow?” isn’t a much searched for term on the average day, but last Friday it was.
So I whipped a little bit of advertising onto my popular page to see if the stupidity of the internet searchers could make me a few bucks. I know that might sound kind of cynical, and all I mean by that is that people asking what time the world is ending are an unusual bunch, and I’m glad they asked the question and I had the answer.
Now, what where my adsense earnings for my blitz of page views? Less than $100? Yep. Less than $10? Yup. Less than $1? No. So nothing I can really retire with.
So I looked at the economic model for making money from adsense, and here it is.
- Assume a CTR (Click Through Ratio) of 1%. I didn’t fare this well, but close.
- Assume a $0.05 reward per click
- Assume 10,000 page views per month.
- This equates to earnings of 100 clicks at $0.05 / click = $5
Now, this isn’t enough unless you have 1000 pages of ads, which is entirely possible I suppose. For me a good post requires an hour to craft, so I would have to have 1000 hours or 25 weeks of non-stop writing to get a $5000 / month income. And that’s for evergreen content, where my biggest success to date has been transient “eve of destruction” stuff which isn’t sustainable. With 50 cents per 1000 visitors, you need a lot to retire!
Some of the challenges with this are that not all my posts are excellent, and I don’t always know what people are looking for. Others are that it’s a competitive world, and writers are ten a penny.
So is it possible to become at least half of rich and famous through adsense. Check back in 25 weeks, and I’ll let you know!