$500 Per Year

This week marks my one year anniversary using AdSense.

It’s been a decent relationship.

I don’t like the ads that run on my blog for the most part.

But its been a great learning experience.

And I made just over $500 in the first year.

All of that goes to the Grameen Foundation so that they can loan money to women in Uganda who are setting up cell phone businesses in their homes.  I figure that at least 10 women are in the phone business in Uganda because of this blog and that’s a really good thing.

Here are some stats that come from my Adsense account.

My daily earnings have steadily increased throughout the year. It’s been about $2/day in the past month.

Traffic has also grown pretty steadily over the past 12 months.

And click thru rates have been a mixed bag.  They moved up nicely in late 2004, but they’ve been coming down recently. At this point, it appears that 1% is about what I can expect from Adsense.  This is directly related to the bad ads that I don’t like and nobody clicks thru on my blog.

And finally, the cost per click is pretty low at less than $0.20 although there is a recent uptrend which I hope will continue.

After running through all these charts, I come away thinking that $500 per year is great but way less than I could earn if I really wanted to optimize the ad revenue on this blog. I’ve learned most everything I can about AdSense in the past year and if I am willing to spend some time on this, I may well end up moving to something better suited to my blog going forward.

I am sure that the phone ladies would appreciate that too.