freeg131: Philip Gamble

(over the last month)

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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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I was recently asked by one of my computing teachers if I knew somewhere were you could see how popular a particular website was. I recommended Alexa, easily manipulated, but probably the most widely known about site providing estimates of traffic stats.

Obviously the different traffic estimation sites use different techniques to calculate traffic data for websites, so some variation in their results should be expected.

Here is a quick look at the popularity of what is, under normal circumstances, my most popular site - GameMaker Blog.

Alexa - #438,208, however the week average is higher at 332,014.

Compete.com estimates the number of unique visitors to a domain per month. For April their figure for GameMaker Blog is 658. This figure is far too low. Even if we are just counting visitors to the blog itself, the figure should be closer to 3,000 and that is excluding the much larger number of people who see the site through the GameMaker Affiliation Service.

Quantcast is a site I found relatively recently a couple of months ago. Unlike the other sites Quantcast provides much more detailed information about visitors to particular websites, based on the number of monthly US unique visitors. They give GameMaker Blog, at the time of writing, a rank of 622,506.

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• Super Aguri went bust - is this the last we will see of Anthony Davidson
• Watford Observer reports on pupils grilling politicians
  “I think these pupils were right to grill these politicians - they should all be grilled and preferably served up with barbecue sauce.”
• I was contacted by a game cheats website ( http://cheatbuzz.com/blog/ ) who wanted to do a link exchange with GameMaker Blog, although I think I will decline since their traffic rank is far worse than mine.
  

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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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Yesterday lunchtime I was invited along with Jon to attend Mr Needlestone’s first student e-council meeting to discuss the use of technology in school and in particular our school’s e-learning resource, Rickypedia. Most years were represented and I was surprised to see that I actually knew a couple of the lower school members.

I couldn’t stay for the full meeting as I then had to demonstrate my computing coursework to Mr Cruse. And yes, it went wrong. This was followed by a discussion about GameMaker - Mr Cruse is considering teaching in it to Year 9 (but couldn’t complete the 1945 tutorial!), and my websites - primarily GameMaker Blog but also some general talk about SEO (mainly how I ‘hijacked’ 3rd place in a search for “Rickmansworth School“).

This was followed by Computing in which we undertook a field-trip. To the room next door, the library and LI6 to inspect hubs and the server. What fun! Still it made a change from the normal lesson format.

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Google AdSense is widely regarded as one of the best ad networks to use to generate revenue from your website and it is used on thousands of major and minor websites around the globe. As I recently turned 18 I decided I may as well give it a go, as I was looking for ways to increase my revenue from my most popular website, GameMaker Blog.

Jonathan Cox has used AdSense for a long time on Icebrick, the free online games website that I have long championed at my school (and converted a fair few people to as it wasn’t blocked). I must admit it has been quite satisfying on occasions to walk into the sixth form Library and see people playing games at Icebrick.com. I dug up an e-mail from 2004 in which Jon said he was getting around 5,000 page views and £2-3 from Adsense a day.

When I registered I was surprised to see that my account uses USD. M any of the other networks I use pay in USD and I fully understand the reasons for this - I more often than not pay for web services in dollars and discuss the valuations of websites in USD with other people from the UK. Although I had thought AdSense had a GBP service and assumed as I was registering with a UK address my accounts would be set up in this way. I can’t see any way to convert my account over to GBP, not that it matters, using USD will make it easier for me to see how AdSense compares to the other networks I am using. A downside however is that it will probably get me levied with a cheque cashing fee come payment day.

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