freeg131: Philip Gamble

Over the past week or so Matched has cancelled all 4 of my active adverts which had been paying me £12 a month.

“Some of you have been asking us why your pages have recently been declined, even though you’ve had adverts displayed on them for several months

The reason for this is that several of our advertisers have recently been conducting reviews of the pages displaying thier ads and have asked for some to be removed. This could be for any number of reasons, including lack of relevant content and a poor quality of page.

We have attempted to re-assign new ads for all those pages that were initially declined, but unfortunately there are some that we’re unable to assign other adverts to.

If you’ve found that one of your pages has been declined, we apologise for the inconvenience, but remember that you can now submit other pages instead!

Thanks for using Matched.co.uk…”

Thank you. It was good while it lasted.

I am not all that surprised to be honest as the ads were never particually tagetted - I am more amazed that advertisers actually did, for several months, want to advertise Life Insurance and Corporate Events on a website about a park.

This means there are currently no adverts on CassioburyPark.info which had been getting £9/month through matched.

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Woo.

Now I can be bored until book return day.

Whilst trying to avoid revising last weekend I re-did the Cassiobury Park.info website. Instead of using a design I created myself I used a free CSS template. Much of the content is the same as before however I also added some photographs and created an entirely new front page.  I have already noticed a slight improving in Google rankings.

£12 from Matched is due in about 5 days.

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In May advertising revenues from GameMaker Blog were $11.54 + £5.00

Quite a low click-through ratio is being achieved with AdSense, when compared with the format installed on my Aidy Boothroyd soundboard, despite the fact that it is currently displaying ads for computer hardware, limo hire and loft conversions. I guess moving the ads above the fold so they are immediately visible when the GameMaker Blog loads could have a big effect on the number of clicks, so I have moved them above the ProjectWonderful ad which is sold by time period.

Earnings from my websites about Cassiobury Park and Stencyl for the past couple of months can be seen below - the revenue is all from a company called Matched which pay £3 for each page they can match an ad to per month (up to a maximum of 5 pages).

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This weekend I bought two items off eBay for a total of £1.

First I paid the sum of £0.99 for two Pennbury domain names, pennbury.co.uk and pennbury.com. Pennbury, near Leicester, is one of the Governments shortlisted locations which may be developed into an eco-town - one in a list of 15 which will be narrowed down to 10 in 6 months.

Once the domains have been transferred I will probably develop a small information site in the style of cassioburypark.info providing details about the proposed development. If the project goes ahead under the same name there will be a town with 12,000 - 15,000 residents, so I imagine the domains would have some potential.

The £0.01 I paid was for a set of headphones for my fake ipod. Like the other item, the seller here is obviously making a loss. Despite this the seller is still selling many identical items - an attempt just to boost the amount of feedback received, a hope of future businesses or just general foolishness? I wonder…

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I’ve never really compiled a comparative list of all my monthly traffic stats, instead I tend to focus on one site at a time - but I figured it would be nice to see the relationship between the effort I put into maintaining sites and the amount of traffic they receive to see if my time could be better spent.

GameMaker Blog (blog only, NOT gma)
Unique visitors: 2,704
Pageviews: 9,760
Time spent on site: Lots - blogging, checking comments.

Aidy Boothroyd
Unique visitors: 1,737
Pageviews: 2,939
Time spent on site: Half an hour creating a soundboard.
Note: Normally traffic would be at much lower levels than this, however the soundboard was picked up by a couple of football forums resulting in a huge spike in traffic levels.

Stencyl
Unique visitors: 375
Pageviews: 660
Time spent on site: None.

freeg131
Unique Visitors: 202
Pageviews: 426
Time spent on site: Surprisingly little considering the number of blog posts made - a distant second behind GameMaker Blog.
Note: Traffic increased dramatically with the addition of this blog.

GameMaker.tv
Unique visitors: 125
Pageviews: 185
Time spent on site: None.

Cassiobury Park
Unique visitors: 83
Pageviews: 279
Time spent on site: None.

GameMaker Stream
Unique visitors: 56
Pageviews: 79
Time spent on site: None.

The site below was excluded from the above list because of its nature - serving ‘ads’ across many sites - most of them not mine.
Game Maker Affiliation Service
Unique visitors: 10,938
Pageviews: 70,810
Time spent on site: Very little. Fixed a chmod issue, otherwise just checking stats.

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In the past month or so CassioburyPark.info has had around 230 page views, taken up none of my time, and has earned me £9 (~$17.90).

The site, providing basic information about Cassiobury Park in Watford, has not been promoted anywhere and does not rank highly in Google. In fact for a search of “cassiobury park”, cassioburypark.info is not even on the first page.

Despite poor Google rankings most of the traffic does originate there. However the vast majority is from specific search terms such as “cassiobury fun fair” and “history of cassiobury park” instead of people looking for general information about the park. In total 52 different search terms were used to find the site in this past month.

The money comes from matched (which is not a dating website!), an ad network that pays you £3/month per page (upto a max of pages 5 per site) for including an Google AdSense style text ad on your website.

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