Content Site Income Report – November 2022

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.