I'm doing a thorough analysis of the monetization strategies on eKstreme.com and I've come up with a lesson and an interesting observation.

The first lesson worth repeating a 100 times for everyone: diversify your income streams. A few months ago, eKstreme.com was only supported by Google's AdSense, and so it rode the turbulent ups and downs of it. Actually, for most of 2006, the montly earnings were going down, a trend that started in April and continued till December. This led me to look at other sources of income. The current strategy is as follows:

• AdSense is still the main ad system used, but it's ever decreasing in earnings and the slice of the earnings it brings in. Eventually, I think it will be relegated to a backup system.
• I have an old ValueClick account that I revived. It used to be the backfill for AdSense, but now it's being rotated in on all pages too. Also, since it's a CPM system, it's used on this blog and anything that gets referred from digg.com or reddit.com. That is, it monetizes high drive through traffic pages.
• Finally, I started using Text Link Ads, and the results are amazing. Again, there are fluctuations, but the peaks more the offset the downturns, and so overall, a great earner. I use TLA only some targeted pages.

What's the point? February was a record earnings month for me, with AdSense earning about a third of the total. If I didn't have the other income streams, the site would have earned a pathetic amount. That's why diversity is necessary. Even better, March is panning out to be another good month, but AdSense is acting up again.

And now a thought: For a while now I've had a deep feeling that Fridays are terrible days in AdSense. Why? It just never seems to earn as much as I do the rest of the week. So today I did an analysis for the past six months, and sure enough Friday was the worst of the working days. The difference between Saturdays and Sundays was minmal, so they're equivalent. Surprisingly, Wednesday was the highest earning day of the week, followed by Thursday.

What does this mean? Firstly it's interesting that different days have such wildly differing earnings. Secondly, this may be very hot data for optimizing AdSense impressions. Since Fridays are terrible, I can test new ad networks on Fridays or I can tweak the impressions to reduce AdSense impressions on some days while upping other networks. On Wednesdays, I may run an AdSense only strategy. I'll be looking more into this, and I'll run some tests.

One effect this will have is that the overall AdSense impressions might go down. This is tweaking the inventory at its heart, and who knows, Google's algo might have impressions as a variable. Whatever happens, the only result I care about is higher earnings

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