In the Interest of Transparency... Earnings
- Marye Audetposted 12 years ago
0Because I have been high profile for my earnings I wanted to be transparent and let you all know that between Oct 2011 and today my HP earnings per day have been basically cut by 60% on average. I have learned to accept that there are going to be ups and downs and prepare for the inevitable downs. No doubt traffic and earnings will climb again at some point - just wait it out.
My hubviews are down from about 13k a day to 7k a day. My cpm remains much the same. In my "other life" as a food writer it is much the same. Not necessarily the blogs - my blog is actually up more than 60% over the past few months and continuing to grow. One of the advertising networks I work with on my blog says that they are seeing a huge drop in the CPC that advertisers are willing to pay.
Every job has it's positives and negatives. Everything you do will have ups and down. Numerous people with "real" jobs are laid off with no warning. I do not depend solely on my earnings here because each day is a crap-shoot when you are a writer. I have blogs, I am a published author in both books and magazines and I write for a variety of other Internet markets. As much as I would like things to return to how they were before Panda ... you have to move along with life. More and more people have decided that writing for the Internet is what they want to do. the Web is glutted with blogs, websites, freelance writers, and everything else you can imagine. With that kind of competition the market had to take a hit. What would happen to the cost of beef if all of a sudden everyone was raising beef in their backyard? You could get it for about 10cents a pound! As always, in order to succeed you have to find a need and fill it. Be different. Be unique. Be yourself. Most of all be positive... Sure, it could be worse tomorrow but... it could also be better. Maybe I only had 7,500 page views today but maybe tomorrow I will have 17.500. You just can't predict it.
Hope this helps a little. If all of our income is down an average of 50% hubpages income is down by the same amount. And their overhead is a lot higher.
Marye:
As a few of the other hubbers already mentioned in the forum-we need to have a bit more patience and faith, and hopefully the earnings will return to a normal status. I know that my earnings on HP are nowhere near to what you make as a full-time writer on the site. But cannot complain and have done quite well over the past 14 months since joining. However it looks like my earnings have also decreased over the past few months. Let's all hang in there for the long run.
Jl
Thank you. It's always nice to be on the first page.
Ummm...is there a "Like" button for what you just said?
- RTalloniposted 12 years ago0
Thanks much for the update with some info, and the interesting comments as well. As for accusations, we can imagine what the result of considering the source(s) would likely be--I'll be nice and stop there.
Appreciate very much that you share what you've learned and take an interest in those of us who aren't at your level of seniority or earnings. Your efforts to help others learn is just one of the things to like about HP. Looking forward to that next up date after you've waited the lull out. Thanks Marye, this mirrors my own experience in so many ways. Nice to see another person backing it up to avoid any doubt
Thank you for taking your time out to share this. As a new Hubber, I've been considerably discouraged as the traffic I receive here is less than at my personal website that has a limited audience. I had hoped writing for a site like HubPages would help me appeal to a larger audience and was worried that I was wrong. From what I can tell of your message and the responses here is that I was not wrong so much as my timing was off.
- EmpressFelicityposted 12 years ago0
My traffic has dropped by almost 70% as well. But unlike you and many others who get views in the thousands. I was doing fairly well seeing it rise each week to a new steady high. My views were about 150 - 160 a day and now 50 is the average (Or i could say the max and min
) It's like the board is stuck for me around 47 - 50.
The funniest part is that none of my rankings have changed on Google (+ or -1 of what they were three weeks back) and different hubs get views each day. One hub gives me 30 of those views and the next day the same hub will have just 3 whereas another will have 30 - 35!
However, earlier all these single day hoppers fetched a steady 30 at least.If Columbus had given up he would never have landed on the American continents. If Alexander Graham Bell gave up we would not have the wonderful ability to communicate we have today. Every millionaire, billionaire, and success story in history has a timeline of failure and success... usually many failures before successes.
If you are taking time away from your paying job and/or responsibilities to write here then you should probably stop unless you are making enough to warrant it - BUT if you are just writing in your free time? What is it going to hurt to continue to write and hone your skills?
When I started here I was a stay at home mom that had not worked outside the home in 27 years. Since I started I have been contracted to write cookbooks,written magazine articles, written for a variety of networks including Discovery Channel AND edited as well. I have had opportunities that I might not have had otherwise.
Who is to say that traffic will not skyrocket tomorrow or next week or next month? And if you weren't writing here what would you be doing? If the answer is watching tv then you might as well write.
The only problem about quality articles is that the algorithm Google is using isn't written to give searchers quality articles. Rather, their algo is weighted to satisfy the query searchers type in. That's why so many of us have been puzzled by a poorly written article ranking highly.
The reason this happens is because the text, images, and tags are optimized, the person that wrote it knows better how to rank a page for that particular query. Not saying all searches come up with poor stuff, but the better keyword, on page SEO, and backlinking is going to outweigh the better writing with Google's algo.
Ironic, I know, when so many like to say SEO is dying
Howard. You obviously think like an engineer.
In the first year income was much lower. It does not go up exponentially in a way that is necessarily linear or rational. The increase in traffic and income is based on how many hubs I wrote in any one month, what the hub was about, how Google indexed it and who linked to it.
For example. A hub I wrote early on about how plastic bags were being used by crafters was mentioned and linked in a Treehugger.com article. Treehugger is owned by Planet Green which is owned by Discovery channel. That month the views and income went up much higher than I would have expected under normal circumstances.
When I was going through my divorce I wrote very little. Obviously traffic/income did not build at a rate that would have been expected if you compared it to previous months.
I assure you - I am one of, if not the, most honest people you will meet. I literally will drive 5 miles back to the store if I discover the cashier has given me too much change or not charged me for an item. Nothing on my success story is inaccurate or fudged, nor will it ever be.
I can't complain about my CPM which has held up pretty well (I never expected it to remain at Xmas levels!) My traffic too isn't bad, as such, my concerns are more with the general downward trend - even if it is only gradual. I know that HubPages can't wave a magic wand and make it go away, however. I think many of us are jittery after all the ups and downs of the year since panda came in.
I have no reason to question the truthfulness of the HubPages Success Stories, all the people included have seemed like very real and straightforward people when I've had any contact with them. Likewise with Hubpages staff, although the facts are often presented with a positive spin - any professional businees organisation is going to do that, however, and they give you enough information to make your own judgements, if you choose.
In my experience, the helps and tips given by HP staff are often invaluable and I suspect that not enough hubbers actually read and listen to them thoroughly enough.
All in all, I'm happy with the overall experience. (I'd just prefer be in a "flow" rather than an "ebb" phase!)
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