As your website grows in terms of traffic and popularity, it can become a valuable asset for generating revenue. 

One way to monetize your website is through advertising. One of the most popular ways to do this is through Adsense, a program offered by Google that allows you to place ads on your website and earn money for each click or impression. 

However, as your website continues to grow, you may want to consider using a more advanced ad networks provider such as Ezoic, Mediavine, or Adthrive.

Ezoic, in particular, offers several advantages over other ad networks. For example, Ezoic provides more control over the ads displayed on your website, allowing you to optimize the ad experience for your users. 

Ezoic offers a highly valuable reporting system that provides detailed insights into your ad performance and revenue. I’m more attracted to using Ezoic for my website portfolio. This can help you make data-driven decisions about how to optimize your ad strategy.

These are kinds of information you must have read on many pages, but not many have discussed Ezoic’s direct ad order feature and how you can use this tool to improve your website revenue. 

What is direct ad order?

The Direct Ads feature of Ezoic allows you to integrate any ad orders you have directly sold into Ezoic’s ad testing system. This enables you to negotiate your own deals with advertisers and has their ads displayed on your website directly. 

What this means is if your typical EPMV on Ezoic and overall revenue is lower than expected, you can reach out to advertisers or competitors to get a better CPM which is what amount an advertiser pays you for every 1,000 impressions on an ad.

Does direct ad order boost your EPMV and revenue?

The outcome of direct selling will depend on the terms of the deal you have secured. When executed effectively, it has the potential to boost your ad RPM and revenue significantly. But obviously,  the primary motivation for choosing direct selling should be to increase revenue.

For example, if your website’s average EPMV is $5 (which only you know) and you find an advertiser who is ready to pay you  8-10 CPM, which will boost the average EPMV record and ad revenue that will be counted as ad mediation on Ezoic dashboard.

This means you will still be earning your regular revenue with Ezoic (sometimes, with direct ads, the Ezoic ad revenue might lose some impressions) + the additional revenue you have just secured from the advertiser. 

Does Ezoic’s payment cover direct ad revenue?

Now not to confuse, Ezoic will just display your ad performance on their dashboard and analytics but will not be responsible for any payment as Ezoic is reporting the information you have imputed on their direct ad order tool. You should receive the payment from the advertiser directly.

Here’s what Ezoic insider has to say about direct ads payment:

How do you prepare to run direct ads on your site?

To begin with, it’s essential to know the amount of monthly traffic your website receives. Traffic and impressions are closely linked, and it’s one of the first things an advertiser checks before launching a campaign. 

If your website receives more than 50,000 monthly visitors, direct ad sales can be a beneficial revenue stream for you.

Another important factor to consider is the type of content on your website. Certain niches, such as finance and medicine, tend to generate higher ad revenue than others. 

It’s essential to identify the niche of your content and research the market to understand what could kind of deal would be beneficial for you.

Securing a direct ad deal requires effort in finding advertisers, communicating with them, and successfully selling a campaign. Once a deal is secured, you will need a system to track ad clicks and impressions. 

However, Ezoic’s direct ad tool can simplify this process and save you a lot of time. Here’s what the overview of Ezoic direct order campaigning looks like:

1. Start with a Media Kit

A media kit is a webpage that provides information about your website’s traffic and audience to potential advertisers. 

It typically includes data such as the number of monthly visitors, the demographics of your audience, and the types of content on your website. By presenting this information using numbers and percentages, it gives advertisers an idea of the potential reach of your website. 

In order to make it effective, it is important to keep your media kit publicly accessible, make it visually presentable, and ensure that all the information is accurate and factual. 

This can help potential advertisers understand the value of advertising on your website and decide whether to advertise with you.

You can customize your media kit in your own way, but the goal is to represent the most important data advertisers are looking for: this one could be a good example – 

2. You will also need a rate card

The rate card represents the price you have set for all the ad placements available on your site has to offer. 

For an advertiser to be able to consider your ad inventory, the rate card will help them to align their budget with your expectation. You can consider selling high-viewability ad positions like your sticky sidebars and footer ads, or you can sell all ad placements with distinct ad rates.

A clean and straightforward rate list makes things easier for advertisers. You can add demographic price rates too because Ezoic direct ad order tool will let you select particular countries if needed.

3. Wrap your requirements with a spec sheet & and a payment solution

Usually, you are more than fine without ad spec requirements (such as ad type, sizes, and performance in terms of loading speed) for the advertisers. Being precise with these will help you run the ad campaign more smoother than without.

You can also add any specific requirements for third-party ad tags, flash or rich media, and more.

When you have completed your ad order kit, the next step is to secure a dependable payment solution. 

How to find advertisers?

Once you’ve crafted a compelling traffic presentation and ad requirements guidelines to make your website an attractive destination for advertisers, the question remains, how do you connect with them and vice versa?

There are multiple ways you can look into finding opportunities for direct ad orders:

1. One good way to start with is to go direct; you will need to identify advertisers who are already bidding on your inventory and would be a suitable match for your direct campaign. Once you’ve compiled a list, reach out to them and present your pitch.
2. Another way is to outsource media sales. If you lack the resources for outreach but have the financial means, consider utilizing services that can provide leads for direct ad sales, such as Winmo, MediaRadar, AdMall, and more.
3. Identifying brands, products, and services that are featured on your or a competitor’s website is another great idea. Then you can contact the advertiser or agency decision-maker directly to discuss promotional opportunities.
4. You can also look at Thalamus.co Marketplace, where you can find both current and new campaigns that are put out directly by advertisers or agencies. Be sure to check it regularly.
5. Networking and attending industry events can also be a great way to connect with potential advertisers and agencies.
6. Research and find out what are the brands, products, and services that are trending in the market and reach out to them as well.

How to set up your direct ads?

Once an advertiser expresses interest in your website and a mutually beneficial revenue agreement is reached, you can begin to establish your direct ad campaign through Ezoic.

To do that: 

Step 1: On your Ezoic dashboard > click on Ezoic ads.

Step 2: On the left menu, select ad sales > then turn on direct ad orders.

Step 3: After turning on the direct ad order tool, create an ad order by clicking on “add direct ad order”.

Step 5: Follow the Ezoic guide and complete your order creation process.

Step 6 [important]: Once the order is created, you will need to add ad creatives (basically works like a trigger to link with your existing placeholder to run direct ads) and assign them to the location of your site as agreed.

Step 7:  While creating your ad creative, make sure the size and tags are correctly assigned. Once done, save your creative, and your ad order should be marked as ready. 

Come back to direct ad orders in the next couple of hours; you should notice the ad status will change to delivering. You will receive the served impressions and click status on those ads and track daily revenue on your Ezoic dashboard. (please note Ezoic only calculate your revenue based on the ad served, you should collect the payment from the advertiser directly)

If your direct ad’s CPM is higher than the typical Ezoic ePMV for your site, then you should notice a better overall ePMV on your site, and ad performance can be analyzed on the Ezoic BDA tool.

Summing up:

Running direct ads on your site is not a cakewalk; however, if you approach it the right way, you can make some good money with this monetization strategy. That being said, most website owners still prefer programmatic ads because of their hands-free nature. This article intends that it’s worth going for direct ads only when you have a deal that pays better than your current programmatic ads.

You can run your campaigning, analyze the revenue and RPM in the bigger picture, and then consider the approach that makes you the most money if the effort is worth it.

Managing a website portfolio can be a rewarding and lucrative endeavor, but it also requires careful planning and ongoing maintenance to ensure the success of each site. Sharing income reports with others can provide valuable insights and help identify improvement areas.

By regularly monitoring traffic and revenue, staying up-to-date with industry trends and best practices, and continually seeking ways to optimize and grow each site in the portfolio, website owners can maximize the potential for financial success and build a sustainable, long-term business.

In this income report series, we aim to share our growth journey and the key factors that have contributed to our success. We will also share the minor details we focus on each month to improve the overall growth of our portfolio. Our goal is to provide inspiration and guidance for building your own AI-driven website portfolio at a lower cost

1. Traffic & Earning Overview

During the month of December, the portfolio sites saw a substantial drop in search traffic, which followed a similar rate of traffic drop (7494 visits) during the transition from October to November. This decrease in traffic largely occurred on websites that rely heavily on AI content.

Based on our data, we believe the AI content isn’t the sole reason for this traffic drop. In fact, the decline in SERP ranking for a couple of sites in the portfolio indicates we need to update those contents that were used to drive a major part of the traffic on prominent sites.

How do we know content updates should get our content back on track?

We had always believed that with a well-planned content production strategy and expert guidance, we could create highly optimized content at a low cost for multiple AI-driven websites that compete on SERPs. When we noticed that some keywords on one of our well-maintained sites were losing their positions, we decided to update the top-performing content that was driving traffic.

Just three weeks later, we have already seen some positive results. Most of the updated content has recovered its keyword position and the traffic it had lost. In fact, our overall monthly traffic on those sites is even better now. I will later highlight the two sites that we were able to recover from the traffic and pageview loss, as well as the corresponding recovery in revenue.

While this strategy may not be effective for all sites in the portfolio, we are confident that we can execute it successfully in the first quarter of 2023.

Could this be a seasonal traffic drop?

It is difficult to determine whether or not the traffic drop mentioned is seasonal. There could be a number of factors at play, such as changes in search algorithms, competition from other websites, shifts in consumer behavior, and whether people are looking for the topics at the same frequency they previously did.

The compassion between December traffic of 2021 and 2022 shares common traffic frequency, although it’s difficult to conclude, given we have many more new pages (than 2021) on the sites responsible for driving traffic. What I would like to note is that the comparison between 2021 and 2022 December traffic shares a sudden drop in traffic despite the sites were making some growth in the previous months.

I do not think the traffic drop mentioned is necessarily a seasonal occurrence. We have recently been able to recover SERP positions and traffic on a couple of sites, suggesting that other factors may be at play than this being a seasonal occurrence. The comparison might have produced different results if we had recovered these rankings and traffic for most of our sites in the portfolio (which is too good to ask for in just a month).

That being said, let’s get into the traffic and pageview stats of the portfolio:

The overall traffic for the portfolio declined by 10.93% in December, with a total of 61,045 visitors compared to 68,539 in the previous month. In addition, there was a noticeable decrease of 11.68% in page views, with 71,221 page views in December compared to 80,643 in November.

It is worth noting that these numbers represent the entire portfolio, and it is possible that some websites within the portfolio may have experienced different levels of traffic change. One site in the portfolio saw the highest individual increase in traffic, with a gain of 106.04%. This website has received significant content updates. The greatest individual loss in traffic among the websites in the portfolio was -46.24%.

It looks like the revenue for a particular portfolio in December was $578.55, which is a decrease of 19.16% compared to the previous month’s revenue of $715.68. The ePMV, or estimated pageview value, also decreased by 12.02% from the previous month. This decrease in ePMV contributed to the overall drop in revenue of $137.13 from the previous month.

The average ePMV for the portfolio in December was $7.59, where $17.03 is the max for a particular site, and an average of $1.23 is the lowest ePMV for a site in the portfolio.

Let’s compare the portfolio data at the same time of the previous year (Dec 2022 vs. Dec 2021): 

1. Total Visits (-9.78%)
2. Pageviews (-15.16%)
3. Revenue (+10.81%) 
4. ePMV(+22.82%)

2. Traffic Overview By Site

It looks like the traffic data for a portfolio of websites showed mixed results for the month of December. For most of the sites, traffic was lower than in November, but five sites saw an increase in traffic. This is, by the way, better than what we could achieve in November, as there was no update on the contents.

As I mentioned above, some sites had significant updates during the month of November, and that luckily paid off during the end of 2022. So some sites recovering from the decline add a positive sign to the portfolio, while we still need to work on content maintenance for other sites in the portfolio, and excited to see how that works out.

Here are December traffic data collected via Ezoic BDA: (compared to November 2022). The marked sites are those that heavily undergone content updates during November (still going on), and we are getting some positive output on those keywords ranking + traffic.

In December, the portfolio of websites recorded a total of 61,045 visits. The most popular site in the portfolio saw a decrease in traffic of -14.42%, with a total of 26,327 visits compared to the previous month’s total of 30,762 visits. This translates to approximately 4,435 fewer visits for the most popular site. Meanwhile, the site with the least number of visits in the portfolio received 106 visits.

In addition to the decrease in visits, we also saw a decrease in pageviews, with a total of 9,422 fewer page views than the previous month. The site with the highest number of pageviews in the portfolio in November had a total of 30,228 page views, which is a 16.29% decrease from the number of page views received in November. The site with the lowest number of page views within the portfolio received 109 page views.

As mentioned, the revenue for December is similar to that of November, with a 19.16% drop. The individual records show that fewer sections of the sites within the portfolio have experienced positive growth in terms of ePMV so does in overall revenue while other sites have a comparatively lower ePMV & revenue than the previous month.

The overall revenue statistics are directly proportional to the December pageview statistics, resulting in a total drop in revenue for the portfolio by $137.13, with a total of $578.55 compared to $715.68 in November 2022.

The highest individual revenue recorded was $327.66 in December, accompanied by an 11.58% decline in revenue compared to the previous month. The ePMV for this site was $12.45, which is 11.58% less than in November 2022. The average ePMV across all sites in the portfolio in December was $7.59, compared to $8.63 in November 2022.

The highest ePMV for a site in the portfolio has decreased to $17.31, up from the previous highest of $23.31. That’s a 25.74% decline in ePMV. We have the Ezoic AI taking care of ad placement optimization, so there’s nothing we have changed recently. The fluctuation in ePMV has the influence of lots of factors; let alone, depending on the time of year, the average site in any country may see a 3x difference in their EPMV due to seasonal fluctuations alone.

I also keep an eye on the “ad revenue index by Ezoic” which is a tool that allows you to see how changes in the overall ad index (which is a measure of the performance of ads in a particular network or market) affect the ad revenue of different sites in the network. This can help you determine whether a fluctuation in the overall ad index is impacting all sites in the network, or if it is specific to your own sites.

By looking at changes in the ad revenue index for your own sites, you can see whether a drop in ad revenue is due to changes in the overall market, or if it is specific to your own sites. This can be useful for identifying potential problems or opportunities for improvement in your own ad strategy.

So when I look at the December 2022 ad index data, it seems like there’s a decline in the global ad revenue index. Our site is obviously no exception to that, reflecting a lower revenue than in previous months.

In the ad index below, you can see during 1st fortnight of December 2022, the ad revenue index was above average and then started to decline dramatically and continues to decline until January. The red-marked section indicates the global December ad revenue status for all ezoic sites. And then, I looked at the Ezoic revenue analytics, which pretty much indicates a similar story.

And then, I looked at the Ezoic revenue analytics, which pretty much indicates a similar story. So it’s ideal for recording a lower portfolio eMPV and overall site revenue considering the global ad index status.

4. Expense

With the decline in overall revenue, your net profit is marginal when we have to cover the editor, writer, and AI copywriter tool costs to run the Ai content system. The portfolio overall had a great month despite the drop in Ezoic revenue; the affiliate commissions and revenue from sites that are not focused on Ezoic keep on coming, which makes it exciting as well as optimistic that with the Ezoic revenue back on track, the overall revenue growth of the portfolio would continue to increase.

In terms of Ezoic, though, the December revenue is slightly better (7.34% profit) than what we have invested in production and tools. It’s still amazing to look at how much content we have produced and updated during the month and sorrowed a significant revenue loss on Ezoic but still be able to stay on the profit side, which would be a worst-case scenario for the month of December in the whole 2022 year.

The introduction of Open AI to the AI Writer team and them finding it compatible & efficient to work with has greatly influenced the AI copywriter expanses we earlier had with this project, it turns out to be a savior for the month of December if we consider only Ezoic revenue for the portfolio.

Here’s what the portfolio December total expanse compared to revenue generated with Ezoic Ad revenue (again, this data excludes other revenue sources & expanses for sites that do not run Ezoic) looks like:

Ezoic PnL (Key data for December 2022):

1. Total expenses: $539.00
2. Total Revenue: $578.55
3. Profit (with Ezoic revenue): $39.55
4. % of profit Ezoic revenue brings in: 7.34%

5. Changes & Focus

In December, we noticed the drop in traffic and had to go through multiple checks to find out possible reasons behind the traffic and revenue drop. We typically tend to be more concerned with declines in performance than improvements. Here are some of the key factors we looked at and could be useful for yours:

#1. Traffic drops with revenue decline (which was our case)

Google often updates its search algorithms to improve the quality and relevance of the search results in its returns to users. These updates can have significant effects on the visibility and ranking of websites in Google’s search results. It is not uncommon for Google to make multiple updates to its algorithms in a given year. Some of these updates may be minor and go unnoticed, while others can significantly impact the ranking of websites.

#2. Algorithm updates and impact

We noticed Semrush flagging some high activity days in the previous months, which is where exactly one of our major sites started to lose a major part of its traffic. Recently in December 2022, there could be another update that we haven’t noticed a huge impact on, but that is when some of our updated site contents started to recover their positions.

We also dug into some of the high-traffic landing page data and analyzed the traffic ratio with the previous month. Certain sites have many landing pages that lost their highest positions, while some other sites (surprisingly, where we have worked on updating the contents) have many new keywords in the SERP + have many high-traffic keywords that recovered their rankings.

This has motivated us to work on content updates, and we believe improving the content quality should be able to help the sites recover their lost traffic to a certain point.

#3. Page layout change and impact on ad revenue

We are also aware of the impact that changes in theme and design would have the impact on ad revenue, which stands true for some of our sites in the portfolio… and we had to recheck the ad placeholders and their revenue records and compare them to the record of couple months ago, just to ensure we have not messed up with the recent design updates.

#4. Open AI and content plan + Niche IQ to produce content

We have mentioned Niche IQ in the previous monthly report. Topics is a very helpful tool for discovering relevant content ideas for our websites. It also provides all the necessary keyword research information, simplifying our keyword research process. Normally, we have to spend a lot of time finding new batches of keywords, but Topics make it much easier for us.

Now that the keywords are shorted out, the AI writers can pick their assigned keywords and research the topic before planning their content structure and then use OpenAI to create an article that has quality, offers the solution to people, and well optimized for SEO to try and do best in SERP, at a significantly lower cost.

This could be a content creation workflow to help AI writers sync with the procedure instantly. (just a demo)

Conclusion:

Overall, our website portfolio had a successful month of December, with total earnings of $1,661. This represents an approximate 7% increase compared to the previous month in total. Most of our income came from affiliate revenue, which accounted for ~60% of total earnings. Advertising brought in ~ 30% of total earnings.

You can clearly see traffic to our websites declined significantly in December compared to the previous month. Since most part of our site traffic is organic search traffic, our traffic status heavily relies on SERP performance and ranking activities on Google.

Looking ahead, we plan to continue optimizing our websites for search engines, expanding our affiliate marketing efforts, and introducing new products to drive further revenue growth. We are confident that with these strategies in place, we will be able to maintain and build upon the success we have seen this summer.

The portfolio has completed another month, and the anticipated rebuilding of these once-neglected sites seems to go in the right direction. It’s obvious to face some ups and down with the overall growth of the sites, but given the sites are running on a combination of GTP-3 tools + human edits, it’s not going to skyrocket in the next month.

In the previous month, we shared the traffic, revenue, expansion, and overall PnL, which defiantly portrayed a marginal profit, and we will share the same for November 2022. Overall, we are happy with the output, and steady growth in at least one of the crucial terms makes sense, if not on all sides.

Lately, adding additional AI copywriter tools (like Jasper.ai) during the major discount season has helped us reduce the content production cost by a great margin. We are excited to see how it impacts Ezoic revenue and PnL overall in the upcoming months.

1. Traffic & Earning Overview (Covering Ezoic)

The portfolio sites rely heavily on search traffic, and for the month of November received about 7031 fewer users than the previous month. Most parts of this traffic drop occurred on highly AI content-reliant websites. However, other AI content sites have gained a maximum of 28.14% more traffic than the previous month individually. 

So it’s safe to say the traffic fluctuation does not directly come from the AI content being recognized by google; rather, it’s the content quality we might need to improve in the coming days to stay up top and compete with other pages with the same intent.

The overall portfolio traffic declined in November by 9.30% (68,539 compared to the previous month of 75,570), and we have noticed an obvious decline of 8.79% in page views (80,643 to 88,413 pageviews in October 2022).

The revenue is quite similar to traffic and page view data. The total revenue for the month of November has a 2.90% of decrement to the previous month with the help of a 22.10% boost in Ezoic ePMV. 

The total revenue for the portfolio in November was $715.68, compared to $737.01 in the previous month (October 2022), with an ePMV change of +$0.74. The slightly higher ePMV (+9.39%) has helped the portfolio to maintain a closer total revenue while there are 7,770 fewer page views than the previous month.

If we look at the yearly comparison, the AI sites have expanded a lot in terms of traffic and revenue they are generating. 

The portfolio growth data (Nov 2022 vs. Nov 2021): 

1. Total Visits (+17.60%)
2. Pageviews (+7.13%)
3. Revenue (+109.01%) 
4. ePMV(+77.73%)

2. Traffic Overview By Site

Individual traffic data for the portfolio sites had ups and downs. For most of the sites, the traffic for November was lower than in October, but three sites with a boost in traffic in the last couple of months managed to get more traffic than in October. Similar to October, some major sites continue to lose traffic even though we have recently updated the top-ranking pages, which might help those sites to recover a certain % of the traffic lost recently.

Some of the sites that we believed were tanked started to recover traffic this month which could prove to be a good sign that the AI content updates have been helping as long as done correctly with quality maintained.

Here are November traffic data collected via Ezoic BDA: (compared to October 2022) 

The maximum pageview record for a site within the portfolio in November was 36,109, which is again 13.02% less than what the site had received in October 2022, and 142 being the lowest pageview data for a site within our content sites.

3. Revenue Data Per Site

As mentioned, the revenue in November is close to what it was in October, with a -2.90% drop, but if we look at the individual records, more sites have shown signs of growth thanks to the boost in RPM/ePMV. The overall revenue stats is directly proportional to November’s pageview stats meaning there’s a drop of $21.35 in total revenue for the portfolio, with a total of $715.68 compared to $737.03 in Oct 2022.

The highest individual revenue recorded was $433.07 in November, which comes with a 9.15% boost in ePMV to the previous month, and the exact ePMV was $14.08. The average ePMV was $8.67 in November compared to $7.93 in October 2022 across all sites in the portfolio. 

The maximum individual ePMV has also increased to $23.31 compared to the previous best of $21.03 and registered the minimum ePMV of $1.20 for a site.

With some ad position optimization, we could lift the avg—ePMV by +9.39%, which was -1.69% between September and October.

4. Expense

Publishing content on all the sites on a regular basis is never easy. As we mentioned multiple times, the AI machine was put together in a way that can be cost-effective to run content on all sites while we follow certain standards to maintain the output quality for the content to be competitive on search engines.

We managed to build an effective team of writers who understands the guidelines, knows how to tackle the content’s objective, how to plan a content structure, and then use AI to reduce the time needed to create content that still has a good balance between the answering what people are looking for and the arrangement. Then we also need to take care of SEO; without optimizing the content, it becomes more difficult for search engines to prefer those copies to put on a higher position.

Then there is a need for editors, someone with expertise in certain niches (because the portfolio sites cover different subjects), and uploaders to make sure content is being published regularly to run the entire system smoothly. In addition, we have additional expense with AI copywriter tools that comes with certain word credit.

This all might sound like a lot, but we have managed to run everything on a profit so far, particularly because the content production quantity, I would say, is still at the lower end of its potential when we grow more in the coming days.

Here’s what the portfolio November total expanse compared to revenue generated with Ezoic Ad revenue (again, this data excludes other revenue sources & expanses for sites that do not run Ezoic) looks like:

Key data:

1. Total expanses: $640.00
2. Total Revenue: $715.68
3. Profit (with Ezoic revenue): $75.68 
4. % of profit Ezoic revenue brings in: 11.83% 

5. Changes & Focus

Although these focuses have always been part of the portfolio development, we have updated the approach recently based on the output in recent months.

• Content Updates: We worked with outdated content that we’re still doing great on SERP, and a well-researched update could have kept them higher in the SERP to keep driving traffic to the sites. We designed a workflow where we collected the most traffic-driven keywords from GSC and Ahrefs keyword analysis. We cross-checked the top-ranking pages on the websites to target those pages that need to be updated as soon as possible.

• SOPs for different types of content: The next approach that significantly helped us to let our human writers who control the AI copywriter tools maintain a certain standard across the content, whether it be list-based content, generic blog posts, or tutorials, is by providing them standard SOPs for each type of content. The SOP does not limit the writers in terms of creativity; instead, it focuses on helping the writers have a primary structure in mind to maintain the hierarchy and design across all contents of a site. We have decided to frequently update these SOPs based on the additional requirement we uncover during content publishing. This strategy has helped us to manage the writers more efficiently and reduce the editing burden by a decent amount.
• Ezoic placeholder update: although Ezoic has the AI to place placeholders automatically, we wanted to test some above-the-fold ads after bringing some changes to the site design to see if that can boost the ePMV and overall revenue. Based on the revenue data we have for the month of November, it seems that way, at least for now. Here are the top placeholders for a site that generates the most revenue for the site.

• Good site health score: Maintaining the site health score has always been our goal to make sure the sites do not get stuck with technical issues such as missing metadata, link issues, inappropriate redirects, schema-related issues, etc. Such minor details can be when you want to rank higher up in SERP with more competition from the other sites. We want to keep our sites ready so the content has the freedom to try and rank in top positions. We use Ahref to monitor our sites, and the dashboard view has been really helpful in keeping an eye on what’s happening to the sites all the time. Recently one of our major portfolio sites has encountered some internal issues, and we are witnessing a downfall in terms of ranking afterward. We are still fixing the issues and hope this will help the site recover the positions as soon as possible.

• Site speed and web vitals: As mentioned in the previous monthly report, the site speed and web vitals continue to be one of our primary objectives in this project. With the speed upgrade, we noticed a 6x better-crawling record for the sites and those sites that are passing web vital and page experience according to Google Search Console continues to do well & improve in search engines as well. So we are highly focusing on page performance as a key factor to push the site to do well in search engine rankings. Overall putting everything together in great condition makes a healthy site grow efficiently is the bigger picture. Here’s one of the best web vital records we were able to maintain during the previous month for a certain site in the portfolio.

• Utilizing Ezoic’s Niche IQ: Ezoic always comes up with something to be excited about. Niche IQ is an excellent addition that has helped automate certain things to reduce the overall time investment we had to do without it far. NicheIQ combines an On-page SEO tool, a site health monitoring tool, and a done-for-user keyword research tool. We like to use Topics because it discovers highly relevant content ideas for our sites and provides all the necessary information related to keyword research. This relieves our keyword research process because we usually have to find batches of new keywords for at least 3 sites per day.

Conclusion:

Without an appropriate strategy, it could be a mess to try and run many sites (where new sites are continuously joining the portfolio) with the content being published every single day, but thanks to a well-designed plan, ready-to-use tools + the right people in the right place make it much easier to manage the portfolio.

This income report series aims to share our growth and the fundamentals that helped us reach here; minor details we work on per month to try and improve the overall growth of the portfolio that can encourage you to build your AI-driven website’s portfolio at a significant lower cost.

Ezoic has been helping its publisher to monetize their websites with no barriers. Allowing the publisher to host videos on their website and monetize them without having to face any prerequisites for monetizing can allow many publishers to generate substantial amounts of revenue if they can create video content relevant to their website.

Just when you think this could be an excellent opportunity to increase your revenue, Ezoic comes up with something even more attractive. The latest addition of a tool called Flickify turns your articles into videos with an AI narrator in less than a minute.

You can convert any post from your website to an article just by scanning your post, selecting a narrator’s voice, choosing your theme, and adding images or videos if you want – all these without needing an expensive production crew.

Ezoic claims that the purpose of hosting video & its monetization is to improve page SEO, increase ad revenue, and an opportunity to get your videos indexed & appeared on search engines. All of these mean more traffic and ad revenue to your site.

TEST – Ezoic’s Article To Video Conversion & Its Impact On SEO + Revenue

Based on the available tools on Ezoic, we wanted to combine the “article to video conversion” tool and video hosting to see what kind of result we could get for one of our websites.

We aimed to set up a test with 24 posts that have received the most traffic during the last 2 months and group them with similar post views where each group consists of two posts. One of the two posts will have a video created on Ezoic and have video monetization enabled.

The post without video will be a reference point for us to compare what kind of impact the video insertion has bought on the other page. The key areas we wanted to look at for each URL are:

1. Pageview count
2. Pageview duration 
3. Page RPM
4. Page Performance

We can analyze the “before and after” impact with these data for the set of URLs we gathered, and with that intent, we let the test run for 30 days. 

As discussed, we looked at 24 articles and created a video for 12 of them, while the other 12 were the “control group,” all on the same site. 

After a month, we tried to compare one on one and the average data for the URLs, and it’s pretty visible that we have a mixed output for our matrices. Here are our takeaways: 

1. We assumed with the addition of videos; the page views might increase for pages with video in them due to videos getting indexed and displayed on search engines. Although that was not the output we have in terms of page views – we understand that video visibility on search engines might require more time than 30 days. In addition, page views decreased slightly for the non-video pages, which let us believe it’s a sitewide drop in traffic than just on pages that recently had video inserted. We noticed a -14.63% decrease in pageviews for articles with video and -15.44% for articles without videos.
2. With the addition of video, we also assumed that it could increase the pageview duration. In this criteria, we found a mixed result, with some non-video pages continuing to have a similar pageview duration. In contrast, some pages with video had a higher page view duration than the previous month. This is not the case for all pages with videos, so it might be too soon to conclude anything at the moment.
3. Ezoic claimed one of their main priorities is maximizing ad revenue with video monetization. It holds true for our test, but it appears to be a site-wise RPM increase than just on the video pages. Articles without videos showed a 13.43% increase in RPM over the test period, whereas articles with videos had an 11.15% increase. It is safe to say within the 30 days time range, the videos were not the pillar for RPM increase.

Output:

Site Traffic Change:

Articles with Video: -14.63%

Articles without Video: -15.44%

RPM Change:

Articles with Video: +11.15%

Articles without Video: +13.43%

It is always way more fun when the case study reveals AMAZING results… this is not yet the case. 

So the current conclusion is that the video tool is an amazingly simple way to create decent-quality videos. However, it is not a magic bullet to drive increased SEO and earnings benefits. 

We will continue testing this tool, but the current results show that the fundamental approach of… do it if it adds value to your audience and doesn’t do it if it doesn’t hold with simple video creation. 

We will also update this case study in a few months since the timing of only 1 month is not long enough, as we can see, to provide us with sufficient output. 

In this article, I am going to look at where you can sell your content website and end up with the most money in your bank account!

Here is a great article listing 17 website brokers. 

When choosing where you are going to sell your site there are a lot of things to consider but often it comes down to where you believe you are going to end up with the most money. 

5 Considerations Other than Money:

1. Success Rates – What is the chance that your website will sell? Some brokerages share their success rate. For example Empire Flippers 74% and MotionInvest 96.43% all other things considered it is better to go with a broker that has a better chance of selling your site based on their success rate of selling other similar sites.
2. Effort Required – Some places where you can sell your site like Flippa are very labour intensive requiring you to do all the work to list your site and communicate with potential buyers. Many other brokers offer a managed solution where the listing, escrow and transfer is handled by the broker. 
3. Expertise with Your Business Model – Some brokers specialize in SAAS, some in ECommerce while others in Content Sites. Choosing a broker that specializes in your type of business increases the chances they have buyers on their list and the expertise to help ensure a smooth transfer. It is an added bonus when the broker is an experienced operator in your type of business. 
4. Length of Exclusivity – Some brokers will require a 90-day exclusivity which can be very frustrating if your business is not looking like it is going to sell. I recommend working with brokers who are confident they can sell your business and demonstrate that confidence with only a 30-day exclusivity agreement.
5. Willing to Sell Your Sized Business – Depending on the size of your site some brokers will not be interested. For example, Quiet Light Brokerage has had an average deal size of $500k and will only work with businesses of a certain size. Picking a broker that will work with a business of your size is a requirement.   

But in the end the most important consideration for most people is where can you sell your website and keep the most money! 

When it comes to where you can sell your site and keep the most money the 2 things you need to consider are…

1. Sell for the Highest Price
2. Have the lowest commission Structure

Let’s now dig into both of these considerations below…

Sell for the Highest Price:

So where can you go to sell for the highest price? 

Like many other brokers (real estate etc) there is a strong bias for website brokers to say whatever they need to in order to get the listing. They might promise an unrealistically high price only to negotiate it down and you can feel powerless if there is a long exclusivity period where you have no other option for up to 6 months. 

My favorite method to get the HIGHEST possible price is to use a broker that uses a modified Dutch Auction with a very large audience and success rate! This is exactly the structure that MotionInvest uses listing your business at a premium multiple initially so that if there is a strategic buyer that does not want to miss out on a perfectly aligned business they are willing to pay a high premium multiple. However it achieves the 96%+ success rate by dropping the price at set intervals to ensure the site will sell for as much as possible. This creates the ideal scenario for a seller with a high selling price and a high success rate. 

For example, at MotionInvest if a Content Site is likely to sell for 36x monthly profit it will be listed at a higher multiple say ~45x and at set intervals the price will decline until a buyer purchases it. This ensures that if there is a strategic buyer willing to pay a premium price that value is captured by you the seller. 

Lowest Commission:

This is fairly straightforward… the more money you get to keep the better for your bank account! 

There is a surprising amount of work required to run a successful website brokerage and sell quality sites. This includes building an audience of buyers, completing in-depth due diligence, and supporting buyers/sellers with completing transactions. 

The range for success fees go from a high of 20% to a low of 5%.

The table below shows the commission structure for several online brokers. The cells highlighted in Green show the best value for a managed broker based on listing fees. It is important to remember this is just one consideration and the listing price is the other part of the equation. 

Conclusion – Where to Sell to Make the Most Money?

Based on the info above if you are looking to sell your website for the most money look for a website broker that has…

1. High published success rates
2. Requires minimal effort
3. Has expertise selling your type of business
4. A short exclusivity period
5. Will sell your sized business

And most importantly…

• Will sell your business for the highest price and take the lowest commission on that sale

If your goal is to have as high a probability as possible of putting as much money in your bank account from selling your content website then MotionInvest.com is the best option with their Modified Dutch Auction and favorable Commission Structure.