3 Days in a Row of $300+ Earnings!

Ok, by now it must sound like a broken record... but screw it, I can't help but get a little excited. Yesterday was my third straight $300+ day. This time it wasn't even close - with one network still left to report I'm at $324.03 in ad revenue for yesterday. By the time everything is counted I expect a total of around $332.

Incredibly, I had a mini-surge on top of the 3-day surge I've been experiencing, when one of my sites suddenly got back some Google lovin', completely out of the blue. Back for about 4 months in 2007 Google decided it just loved this site and it was sending 8, 10, sometimes even 14-15 thousand visitors a day to it. And then, literally overnight, Google dropped it like a hot potato. The site was still technically in Google - you just had to look really damned hard to find it. Over the space of 24 hours I went from 12,000 visitors a day from Google to about 600. (A 95% drop in traffic, overnight, sans explanation).

It hurt like a sumbitch when that happened, but I ended up taking it in stride. First off, it wasn't a site that I particularly spent all that much time and effort on, and secondly... well, Google giveth, and Google can taketh away, right? The site would never have been a success without Google in the first place, so I ended up looking at it more as a 4-month, transient Google blessing than a 24-hour Google curse.

Anyway, that was December 2007. Traffic on the site remained in the doldrums through all of this year, until about 2 weeks ago we had one mini-spike of about 2,600 visitors from Google. It didn't last though, and within a day we were back to our normal levels of about 900-1000/day. Then comes yesterday - a Google spike of about 4,800 visitors! I checked my keywords again this morning and lo and behold, they're still showing up at #2 and #3 on Google, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this time the Google lovin' is here to stay.

Until it isn't anymore. :-)

The Ad Surge Continues

Wow - I broke $300/day two days ago for the first time in 2008, and now it looks like yesterday I might have done the same, or at least come damn near close to it. One of my ad networks doesn't report daily figures until midday so I won't know for sure, but I generally make around $9/day with this one and right now I'm at $291.97 with all my other networks. Two days in a row! Ok, ok - not getting excited yet, I know there are up time and down times and I can't go around seeing big trends in two little data points... tempting though that may be. :-)

Oh, and another one to kill this morning for Tribal Fusion Direct:

casualgames-intl.com

Later Update: Yep, its official - I squeaked by the $300 mark again yesterday. Final network report just came in and the grand total was $300.06. No complaints here!

Breaking through the $300/day ceiling

Bit of a milestone yesterday! My daily earnings broke through (just barely) the $300 ceiling. One of my ad networks still isn't reporting as of 9.30am EST so I don't know the exact total yet, but this was a really nice surprise. I've not broken $300 a day since the heady days of December 2007 (when ad revenues were insanely high thanks to 50-60% fills from ADSDAQ).

The revenue breakdown was roughly:

BurstMedia - 30%
ADSDAQ - 23%
TribalFusion - 19%
Adsense - 19%
Valueclick - 7%

The interesting thing is - I didn't have much of a traffic spike yesterday as far as I can tell. In terms of visitors and pageviews, it was business as usual. For whatever reason, all my adnetworks just happened to "pop" with excellent fill rates and strong CPMs. Even Adsense chipped in with the highest daily earnings of 2008.

I have single-day peaks like this every now and again, but I've learned by now not to see these as anything more than aberrations. Apart from December 2007, these big-number days generally just appear out of nowhere and then things return back to normal levels within a day or two. Its always tempting to see big increases like this as the start of a trend, but you also have to be realistic... sometimes things just click.

So far my June 2008 daily average is about $215.50, making this the first month in 2008 where I'm likely to break a $200/day average by the end of the month. Its been a steady increase most of this year (apart from February, when a server crash + short month + crappy fill rates left me with a disappointing average). Check out the results so far:

Daily Average Earnings by Month - 2008

January - $173.42/day ($5376.02 total)

February - $141.86/day ($4113.94 total)

March - $181.10/day ($5614.10 total)

April - $182.67/day ($5480.10 total)

May - $193.41/day ($5995.71 total)

June (to date) - $215.50/day ($6465.00 projected total)

Now that's a trend! :-)