A few months ago I began using google adsense to recoup some of the £18.75 per month that it takes to host cybersoc.com.The results so far have been:
October: £17.76
November: £13.99
I can now report that, for the month of December, cybersoc.com had revenue of £29.72 ($51.13). What did I do differently? Well, one of the things I did was put google ads and search on some of the old cybersoc content – my MA thesis, MPhil thesis and other old papers. Based on the statistics available to me, it looks like users of those pages are more likely to click on the ads than are users of this blog. However, users of this blog seem more likely to use the search facility. The click through rate for the search was much higher than that for the ads although the ads generated 4/5 of the revenue on 3/4 of the clicks. Enough of the badly performed statistical analysis.
Here’s the top search terms for December. I’ve removed a few that were fairly obvious attempts to skew the results:
Top Queries # Queries % Total Queries
transfinancial economics 94 17.537%
cybersex 29 5.410%
cybersex research studies 26 4.851%
having sex online 8 1.493%
cyber sex now online 7 1.306%
computer aided technology, internet society threat benefit, information technology & politics, internet effects, communities dominate brands, digital divide = 4 queries each or 0.746%
internet social effects, autumn marzec, cyber sex, wierd for cybersex online, Harrassment, marzec, sex with childs, cybersociology definition = 3 queries each or 0.560%
[It is now possible to advertise your conference, book, event, or website on cybersoc.com via google adsense. Click here for details].
So do they give you stats on what ads were most often clicked on or is that too embarrassing? Why does cybersoc cost so much to host? I thought website hosting was pretty much a commodity product with appropriately low costs?
Hi David. They don’t tell me which ads are clicked on, probably because they don’t want me (and other site owners) to know how much they are charging advertisers for the keywords they use. They do tell me what the top search terms are and, where there is only one or two clicks on search terms in a day, I’m sometimes able to figure out how much my percentage of that click was worth. Google also doesn’t reveal the % they pay site owners, so even when I can see how much I got, I have no idea what google paid.
I have two different “hosts” for cybersoc – the old site is mostly hosted on demon internet, as it has been since late 1995. For years I used web forwarding from cybersoc.com and cybersociology.com to a sub-domain at demon (http://www.socio.demon.co.uk). There are thousands of links to those pages directly rather than to the domain names I own. I would just move all that content over to my typepad blog (more on that in a minute) but, as this month shows, the google ads on those pages more than pay for them. Demon hosting is £11 per month.
Typepad costs me the £7 or £8 a month in hosting. This is a mid-level hosting package from them because I went over the bandwidth limit for the lower level which is about half the price.
I haven’t included the domain names cybersoc.com and cybersociology.com in my costs but both have various added services and, guessing, I’d say cost me something like £30-50 a year.
So much for internet publishing being “free”!