Looking at this month’s data, I’m not inclined to think that things are much ‘better’ – but they aren’t much worse than the previous month. Given the number of manual spam penalties I have seen being applied to many other publishers, I need to be thankful for that.
The Ad Revenue index is marginally up, and my EPMV moved in line with that, but a slight dip in traffic led to a decrease in earnings for this Case Study site in February, compared to January.
Keep reading for more detailed breakdowns and screenshots looking at February traffic and revenue.
Site Recap
The site is in the ‘Entertainment’ niche – established in January 2021. Monetized with Ezoic advertising.
Approx 350k words of content over 300+ posts.
See full site history, content publishing breakdown, and traffic history here.
February Statistics
Comparing January and February Google Search console statistics, the trend within February itself seems flat (which is always nice at the moment), and while January seemed flat as well – there is a clear difference, in a downward direction in overall traffic levels.
In last month’s analysis, I pointed out the downward trajectory of the last three months, and this identified trend has continued – even though the trend seems to be easing up. Looking at the last three months, from the end of February, the trend is still clear however the downward trajectory is easing off.
Given the continued push of Google to prioritize big brands and forum content, I suspect that the downward trajectory will continue, even if slow. I will be very surprised to see traffic increase again on this site unless I decide to risk significant sums of money in backlinks – but there are no compelling reasons to believe that that would be a high-probability strategy.
From a revenue standpoint, we slipped again. There was reasonable growth in EPMV between January and February, suggesting advertisers are spending more again. This is good news overall but in the context of how Google is diverting organic search traffic, this boost didn’t have a positive impact on overall revenue.
Comparison to the Ezoic Ad Revenue Index
I wanted to benchmark my personal EPMV performance with other publishers, so used the Ezoic Ad Revenue Index to check.
EPMV in the Ad Revenue index trended up, and my EPMV moved in line with that. This is a positive signal for my content, but as alluded to in previous sections – if Google decides to send traffic for queries I used to rank for to other content sources, then any EPMV increase will need to be significantly greater than what it was, to offset the traffic loss and contribute to an increase in monthly earnings.
March Activity
I would be lying if I wasn’t becoming tentative in my planning on how to continue developing this site.
I am seeing stories of many quality sites being hit with spam penalties for the mere suspicion of having AI-generated content included in the site – even though Google has stated that the use of AI-assisted content is not a red flag per se.
Some advice I hear is that there is now no point trying to publish and monetize content unless there is an underlying physical business – while others are saying a text-only content business is a waste of time and you need to diversify your content types and traffic source.
While many are turning to email lists and social media profiles for traffic rather than organic search, and while this seems like a sound strategy, I’m not yet convinced this is viable for this site, because the content topics are so diverse. This might suggest a need to ‘niche down’ and try and boost trust in the brand on a certain topic, rather than the previous ‘spray and pray’ approach we used to take with text-based content.
I’ll continue to survey the landscape, and see what Google has planned for its search results, but it seems the the future is not with Google for web publishers.
