A buck and a half per adsense click?

[Phil]

just got my first adsense click through.
the adsense report tells me that single click is worth $1.47
seems a bit generous, google keep pretty silent about how much they pay per click. does this figure vary? if so what affects it?

you know, a less scrupulous individual may think to set my site as the default site for all the machines in the school (all have individual IP addresses) and generate traffic and revenue that way....

[James]

Hi Phil,

It varies wildly - I have had a single click that paid $0.03! The highest single click I have had has been about $0.40. I have heard of single clicks being worth several dollars in some fields.

It appears that the advertiser can choose how much they have to pay for each click through though not sure how that affects how many times it is served.

You might find more info here: https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answ...r=6382&hl=en_GB (https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6382&hl=en_GB)

[Tom]

Its a bidding competition. Advertisers pay little if no one else bids on the keywords but they can pay loads (I've heard of $20) if the words are popular. I don't think I've ever had over $1 - so I rekon its a good omen for Phil!

[David]

Phil, sounds like you might have a winner on your hands. Great work on the site by-the-way. I just had a quick look - good content - humorous and informative. What more could one ask!

[Tom]

100% agreement with David about the site content. What more could one could ask? More happy clickers! It looks like the ads are for DVDs movies etc so I would (1) adjust the keyword strategy to target this group of words - see Overture Precision Match for ideas (2) seek links from other people who review movies and DVDs. Were you accepted by Looksmart? You could soon (= years) have a stampede of bucks charging at you!

[Phil]

I guess i shouldn't get too excited - i had another click this morning which paid just 4 cents.

I'm sure there's all sorts of algorithms that work out automatically the "value" of a click - not to mention excluding clicks from the same ip - or perhaps even *range* of IPs. Also they might smell a virtual rat when the click through rate is just too high.

As for Zeal, I got fed up with waiting. I disabled Adsense and submitting to them, it's been over four weeks now, so I re-enabled Adsense. I've only got the minimum adsense menu on there so if they do get around to evaluating me then it would be a bit harsh to mark me as commercial. We'll see.

I also stuck one of those domain hop style windows on a couple of my parked domains - this time with Sedo (http://www.sedo.com). Total revenue so far? $0.05. And that was me doing a crafty click through myself.

[francis]

Am I missing something? What's the URL?!

[David]

Phil's a bit bashful about sharing his efforts but I'm sure he could be persuaded with the promise of a few extra clicks ;)

[Phil]

Ok, ok, it's a bit of a cringe but here you go.

zombielore.com (http://www.zombielore.com)

a fanboy site about - ahem - zombies.

I really wanted to have a live site as a vehicle for trying out live Mambo / AdSense / SEO / any other web technology I feel I should get familiar with.

I really wanted the subject to be non-computer related, something I knew about, and not a theme that has already been done to death (pun intended). So there.

[David]

Phil, it's OK, you don't have to justify this site. We all do curious things in our pursuit of academic excellence and in the name of research. ;)

[Tom]

Should you want to study for a M Litt, zombies would make a good thesis topic. See The hero with a thousand faces (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691119244/ref=pd_sxp_f/026-9202160-3011657) and many copycat books. They look at the way in which characters and storylines have been found in stories since ancient times. The posh name for this is structualism and it dates from the Russian theorist Vladimir Propp. He found common structures in tales from different cultures. Here is a book applying structural concepts to screenwriting (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0413715604/ref=lm_lb_1/026-9202160-3011657). A book published this year gave a lot new publicity to the theory The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0826452094/qid=1109968910/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_11_1/026-9202160-3011657) by Christopher Brooker. It would be interesting to know how far back zombies can be traced. Did they have a presence in myth before they appeared in film?

[francis]

I still need to see Shaun Of The Dead. I guess I'll pick it up cheap online somewhere. Goodly use of CSS on the site, Was Mambo easy to work with?

I had to laugh at this set of Google ads that were on your site...

http://www.websitearchitecture.co.uk/storr/forumimgs/phils-links.gif

[Phil]

I think google ads must still be trying to figure out the nature of the site; the public service ads are still cropping up, too.

As for CSS, i can't take all the credit for that - I modified (or should that be mangled) the Javabean mambo template (http://www.mambohut.com/component/option,com_remository/Itemid,26/func,fileinfo/parent,folder/filecatid,350/) to my own ends (it's so much easier to adapt something else for your own ends rather than start from scratch).

Not sure if I can say Mambo's easy to work with. I tried a lot of open source CMS and settled on mambo simply because it was the best looking. They were all about equally easy / difficult. Mambo's great for doing things that Mambo wants to do, but if you deviate from "the right way" then it gets a bit ticky. I felt I was coercing it into displaying things the way i wanted. It exhibits a lot of odd habits, for instance it often makes half a page of submitted content be in bold. so you have to go back to the text, copy and past it out, then copy and paste it back in again. Weird things like that - as if the system isn't really finished yet. Documentation is quite poor, too, so you're on your own experimenting a lot. If you can live with these quirks then it's really liberating having a modularity of content totally separate to layout - you feed in the blurb and it takes care of the rest. This modularity extends to other activateable "bots", like the poll, a bulletin board, random image banner, google adsense bot, etc.

Zombies:
It's generally acknowledged that this unthinking, undead being has voodoo origins, though i'm sure there are earlier manifestations. The idea of zombies in terms of high brow literature I bet has never been done before. I shall investigate further.

I do also find pleasing the simile of zombie PCs - comprimised machines that get reactivated at some point to form a "zombie army" of machines that will bring down a target server, typcically in a mass DOS attack. Victory through overwhelming numbers - just like the real thing.

[Tom]

Try a Google on zombie literary theory (http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2004-03,GGLD:en&q=zombie+literary+theory).