You might have noticed that I currently am running ads on my blog. The ads I am running are from WordAds by WordPress. The reason that I am doing this is because I am running a test to see how many users must have their blogging experience impacted by ads, for the revenue to equal one cent.

It’s by Impressions, not Clicks

Wordads pays based on impressions, not on ad clicks. If you are using ads this means you don’t need to try and convince your friends, family, or readers to actually click any of the ads.

1,000 impressions is about 1$

On Wordads site, it doesn’t actually say how many impressions is equal to one dollar nor does it say how much traffic you must have to get paid. Others on forums though have suggested that 1,000 ad impressions is about $1.00 depending on which countries the visitors originate. I don’t get that many visitors yet, so it seemed like now would be the perfect opportunity to try this out, and to help others who are new to the blogosphere understand how adding ads might actually hurt them more than help. 

But is it?

No, It kind of isn’t. See, you could get 5,000 impressions over the course of a month and think ah, so that is about $5.00 except, the revenue is rounded per day. That means, you need to make at least one cent each day for it to count. I am making up this number because they don’t actually give out their numbers and the values change constantly but going off the average of 1,000 impressions equalling one dollar, that means you must get at least 10 impressions a day to make a cent.  That actually doesn’t seem that bad, but I’ve had days where I have over 60 impressions and I still made 0.00.

Of Course if the required impressions was much higher, like say 10,000 impressions to be $1.00, I would then need at least 1000 impressions a day for one cent. It is likely quite hard to find out exactly how many impressions are needed to make one cent per day because people in different countries are not valued equally. For example, if you are getting a lot of traffic from India, it is worth less than traffic from the USA. So unless you get traffic from the exact same demographics every time, it will be hard to determine what exactly is the 1 cent threshold for you. 

Monthly Revenue = Day1 + Day2 + etc

Since the income is averaged daily, if you are unable to hit the one cent threshold for all days in the month, then you would get 0.00 at the end of the month, even if you were at 9/10ths of a penny each day. That might sound really obvious, but the point here is that they take the daily amount and add it up rather than the entire months impressions, so if you had a day where you were one impression short of a cent, that would get rounded down to 0.00. 

Talking Pennies

Of course we are literally talking pennies here, because if you can’t make 1 cent each day for a month, then you are looking at earning less than 30 cents.  So the question becomes, do you want to be serving ads to your readers if you aren’t even going to be making any money? I haven’t yet found out what the “average” actual impression threshold must be but yesterday,  I inconvenienced multiple people by showing over 60 ads for literally nothing. Not even a penny. 

I understand some people think they will make a lot of money by serving ads to their readers but at what cost?

Future Plans

I’m going to be continuing to test out ads to see how many impressions I need to actually get to recieve one cent, and then will update this with more information.

Unfortunately, I think I might have a way to go, as on some forums users have reported earning $0.01 with over 10,000 ad impressions.