There are many blacklists available you can use download and input into Adsense so that low paying bulk advertisements do not show. Here is one, Google for more: (http://www.adsblacklist.com/)
You can also create channels, for certain categories and track your earnings by channel and then inspect the ads in low paying channels and look for some obvious ones to filter out.
I had an idea a while back to automate this process. Basically a user chooses maybe 8 different places they would be willing to place ads on their site. Then there is software that tries out the different placements, colors, etc, and records how well they do.
Then use maybe genetic algorithms to optimize those variables for ad revenue.
I'm hoping I could just make some javascript the user could put in their code, and it would mix and match the adsense placements (maybe color, etc too)
It would need a way to track the effectiveness of the ads. Tracking ad clicks would be simple enough with JS, tracking how much you make would be harder. I don't know if adsense has an API for that or not.
We recently launched a service that might enhance those earnings a bit. It's tipjoy.com, a micropayment tipping system. Users tip stuff they love online.
Smaller sites will benefit disproportionately, because their fan base is probably more dedicated. So the "tip through rates" should be better. We'll see soon.
Alternatively, getting more targeted ads should help. If you know what your users like to see, it can be great. As Ads increase in relevance they approach content.
Some initial data: 1085 tips totaling $749.73. Who knows how much will be paid. 90%? 10%?
We're had around 15500 page views, not counting the buttons on third party sites like techcrunch for the first 2 days. I'll need to look at the logs for that.
Techcrunch earned around $70 per their post on tipjoy (so far), and that is raw conversion rate there. If more people had tipjoy accounts, the rate should be higher. Then again, people tipped to experiment and help our launch. Lots of factors here.
$70 per blog post isn't too bad at all, though they are a huge site.
Completely depends on the placement, site, what the user is likely to be wanting... Care to share more info?
1000 visitors isn't really all that many, especially not enough to draw big conclusions.
It can vary a lot from day to day, month to month.
For comparison though, a site I run gets around 2,000 visitors a day and the adsense on the site makes about $40 a day.
Just to throw some more info out there, I get 900-1800 unique visitors for 4000-8000 pageviews. I get less than $1.50 a day but all of these ads are run on a forum. I believe that forums have notoriously poor CTR as mine is under half of a percent.
I would die of happiness if I could pull in $40 a day.
Yes, google adsense depends on a lot of things. Its not always the best way to monetize a site at all. The payouts are just really low unless you can bring good traffic to good key words channels.
There's alot of companies out there now just building a site together in rails, and expecting to monetize fully on adsense...
Adsense isn't what it used to be. There are still people out there doing well on it. Just be methodical with your traffic. Continually improve it and learn to understand it.
How many page views per visitor? How many and which ad units are you showing? What is your content area?
$1.5 for 1K banner views isn't to bad. But for 1K visitors viewing 4 pages each with 3 ad units then you'd have reason to be dissapointed.
The amount you make has more to do with the value of the ads and the ratio of impressions to clicks. If your goal is to make money, modify your site to maximize those values, not just the number of eyeballs that see the ads.
All depends on where they are coming from. I'm getting over $30 cpm from one blog with adsense. Add on other ads and affiliates and I'm a happy camper. If only I had more traffic.
There are many blacklists available you can use download and input into Adsense so that low paying bulk advertisements do not show. Here is one, Google for more: (http://www.adsblacklist.com/)
You can also create channels, for certain categories and track your earnings by channel and then inspect the ads in low paying channels and look for some obvious ones to filter out.
You should use section targeting to tell Google which content sections to emphasize for relevance: (https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&#...)
To increase your click through rate you can place your ads in a better position, follow the heatmap:
(https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=...)
There are many other variables that come into play, something known as smart pricing can lead to huge swings in ECPC / CPM.