Internet Writing :: Inklit.com

Posted by John Lockwood on March 22nd, 2008

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AdSense and I have a checkered past. I had an account several years ago, but never made much from it. Last week I decided that really ought to take another look at ad networks like AdSense, since I believe that Pro Blogger / Online Publisher is a legitimate career path for an Internet writer (albeit one with a long start-up curve and a crowded field).

So last week I put up some AdSense on a popular real estate blog I own, and again the results were not all that spectacular — a couple of bucks per day. But things got interesting soon.

Ask any kid with a chemistry set. Nothing interesting happens until you mix two things together.

Enter Associated Content

You wouldn’t think that Associated Content would have much to do with AdSense on the face of it. AdSense lets you generate ad revenue from your web site, and Associated Content is a place where you can sell writing online if you don’t mind not getting paid much.

What tipped me off to the idea that those to things are actually not all that different was a single unifying statistic, CPM. That’s an ad term that you probably know, which means “Cost per Thousand (Impressions)”. Of course as a publisher I’m not interested in cost so much as revenue. Some people call this RPM (Revenue Per Thousand). Google uses the weird expression eCPM, or “Effective Cost Per Thousand”, but effective or not, we’re talking about revenue here.

When I signed up for Associated Content, I knew the rates would probably be lower than they would be for direct writing sales. I tried them out because I thought it would be an easy way to make a quick writing sale or two, and I wanted to see what they offered.

I don’t have a report on the rates yet, because the first article I tried was submitted for up front payment review, which can take up to two weeks. I can tell you that others have reported numbers that don’t impress me much, such as $7.00 per article. Based on that, I doubt I’ll be writing up a storm for them, but we’ll see how it goes.

What really got me interested, however, was when I saw their performance payments, which is based on what they call (wait for it…) PPM, or “Payment Per Thousand”.

PPM, CPM, RPM, eCPM — How Much Money Are We Talking Here?

What got my attention immediately about Associated Content’s PPM was that it was $1.50. My AdSense account hovers around $9.00 per day.

This got me thinking. If AdSense pays about $9.00 per thousand page views, six times as much as Associated Content, maybe Associated Content would turn out to be the victor over AdSense in the Worst-Way-To-Make-Money-Online Throw Down. Are you ready to rumble?

It also got me wondering about how many page views my web sites had, and what that would look like divided by 1,000 and then multiplied by $9.00! It turns out that I may be able to make several hundred per month off of Adsense for a month’s work or so, since I have a fair sized inventory of unperforming content.

“Inventory of unperforming content”. See, I’m talking like a publisher already!

What Kind of CPM do Real Estate Brokers Make?

As soon as I started thinking in terms of CPM, I got curious about how much money I made last year as a real estate broker from my real estate web sites. So I did some really rough-draft calculations, and came up with a figure of somewhere between $20 to $30 per 1,000. That’s not bad considering where we are in the “real estate meltdown” (also known as “the credit crunch” or “the end of carbon based life as we know it”, depending on who you ask). I could probably do $60 per 1,000 if I wanted to hop in the car more and do more sales, but of course that would be cheating.

My Publishing Epiphany

Some time yesterday I had a publishing epiphany, where everything I’d ever written online turned into a viewable page, a 1/1000th fraction of an M that could produce some revenue value for me, some “R”.

The nice thing about thinking about RPM is that it teaches us that we as publishers can increase either our RPM (look for better publishing or ad opportunities) or our M (write more, or promote it better), and either way we’ll get more R, more Revenue.

Perhaps in a future post we’ll talk about the results of my attempting to increase RPM and continue to increase it over time using an open source Ad Server, OpenX.