An important part of niche blogging is the advertising aspect. The assumption is that if people are checking your blog because they are interested in a particular subject, advertising targetted towards that area will be more effective and the audience will be more responsive towards the advertisement. This translates into clicks and purchases, which would benefit the blogger in terms of comission and other kickbacks.

I am using Ad Sense for my Free iTunes Downloads because it was easy to setup and had a good track record. I wasn’t expecting to make a lot of money off it, in fact I didn’t think I would make any money off it. I guessed that I would average a clickthrough rate of about 0.1%, so if I received 1000 hits a day (liberal estimate), I would get 1 click. That’s the general expectation for online advertising and it’s not too far off the mark. The following is a graph of my hits (blue) and clicks (red) for the first 6 months FiD has been active.

Sometimes I have good days and sometimes I have normal days. On the normal days, I hardly make any money, but the pennies add up. Eventually. When I get lucky and get a ton of hits, I have a few days of above average earnings. Google pays out at the end of the next month once you’ve accumulated $100+ USD in earnings, and I received my first check last week for $160ish CDN.

Something odd has been happening recently though, my clickthrough ratio has been oscillating rapidly and increasing at a non-standard pace. I’ve applied a moving average over 10 samples (red) to smooth out the clickthrough ratio data and you can see that there is a climbing trend. I’m not sure why that’s happening, maybe Google is indexing my blog properly and finding the proper contexts, or maybe my audience is growing and getting dumber. Maybe it’s a bit of both!

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: advertising, blogging, fid, google