freeg131: Philip Gamble

the blog and personal portal of Phil Gamble

Matched meltdown

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.

Web ad income upto May 2008

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).

Matched.co.uk Earnings for March and April 2008

April 2008 stats

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.