There are a lot of hubbers that believe that the traffic stats inform the earnings figures. Considering that the traffic stats have not been working well lately it has got people worried that they aren't getting the earnings/impressions that they should be and this is damaging writer trust in HP.
Can we get a response from HP staff on this one please?
Thanks
The traffic stats are not reflective of earnings.
Traffic shows how many people have read your hub.
Earnings show how much you've earned from the ads on your hub.
It's that simple.
The higher the traffic, the more earnings you have but at the same token, different types of content and ads generate different amounts of revenue. Even Hubpages won't know for hundred percent definite what sort of contents earns most, it's a Google Secret to prevent adsense users from exploiting the system.
But to answer your question, yes, traffic stats and earnings are separate. Further evidence of this is when the traffic stats update and the earnings stay the same. I believe the earnings are only updated once a day, the traffic stats once every few hours to once a week... My traffic stats haven't refreshed in 36 hours now but my earnings stats refreshed around 15 hours ago.
How in the world can you state that traffic stats are not reflective of earnings? If you had no traffic you could not earn!
First of all, when you post an article that has impressions, HP takes 40%.
Secondly, not all impressions are yours. Those pay HP 100%.
You can have many articles and plenty of people reading them, but if nobody clicks on their ads (or if there are no ads), you only earn from page views.
Page views equal the number of people reading articles, aka...TRAFFIC!
So, if you logic it out, there definitely is a relationship between earnings and traffic. To say otherwise makes no sense.
Thus, if the page view stats are not correct, the earnings may not be correct either.
Yes, AndrewH. I also notice these things as mentioned by you. Earnings and stats are different. But, not necessarily do earnings get updated. They can also stagger for days just like views statistics. But, you can't relate your earnings with the views of hubs.
Yes, earnings are tracked independently of stats (they are different systems).
Yes, but this does not mean that earnings do not relate to traffic, right?
Yes, it relates, but don't confuse "traffic" with "traffic stats". And don't try to make a numerical correlation, either - earnings cannot be derived from overall traffic as ads pay differently and vary from hub to hub and day to day.
I just thought it was important to let people know that there is a correlation. You are discussing the ways in which it does or does not correlate, but my point was that you can't say "Oh, earnings are not based on traffic", because one way or the other, they are. Clearly there are variances. The stats are supposed to show your page views. Page views equal traffic. I don't understand how the stats page can't tie in with earnings. Just me, I guess.
Of course traffic affects earnings. I think what others are saying is that, when the stats are wrong, our earnings are based on our actual traffic, not our HP traffic stats.
Now that makes sense! What does not make sense is why HP would post incorrect traffic stats! There have been constant complaints about this for some time, and you can see why people are confused and worried.
I share your frustration with the stats being wrong. Why it has not been fixed is a mystery to me. It must not be an easy problem to solve.
Time Traveller, It is in the sense that you can not say that if your views are 100 today and 50 yesterday, and your earnings were say one dollar yesterday. You can not insist that your earnings should be 2 dollars today, because traffic has doubled today from yesterday's 50. Earnings can be same one dollar or more or less depending on the ads and their rates per click or views.
Yes, I know this. All I am saying is that if you have no traffic, you make no money, so there is a relationship there, albeit one that varies due to the things you just mentioned.
For what it's worth, I have seen staff say just that on other threads expressing concern over stats. I wish they would make that part of the weekly email or a blog post so that everyone can see it and be less anxious *Hint Hint Staff! *
I'm confident that HP assesses earnings stats correctly and I know that Google Analytics is available for following traffic - but I think HP does itself no favours by letting their own traffic stats stick or go awry so often. Perception is important in the world of business and branding.
I agree that HP is not doing itself any favors by allowing the stats to go such long stretches of time without updating. Of course I have no statistics or real proof, but based upon recent forum threads and low forum participation, I'd say HP needs to be doing whatever they can to woo good writers and long-time members in good standing rather than discourage them.
They could always just add something to the stats page or FAQ saying the traffic stats usually update a few times per week.
They certainly could, but going from hourly to twice a week just gives a bad appearance, especially when members already seem to be worried that the site is troubled. Like Paul Goodman stated, "Perception is important in the world of business and branding." No/few/incorrect stat updates breeds feelings/perceptions of 'no confidence' among members.
Additionally, I think stat checking kept many members logging in each day, or perhaps more than once per day. While those members are logged in, who knows, they may participate in the forums or decide to write a new hub. Now with no stat updates, there's no reason for many members to log in.
I agree that it would be in their best interest to just update the stats frequently like other sites do, but this horse has been beaten to death. HubPages just isn't that focused on writer retention and they aren't going to spend anything to fix the stats functions. If you look at old threads, people have been complaining about traffic stats for quite some time. If HP were going to do anything about it they'd have done it already.
Letting people know upfront that the traffic stats don't work as most users would expect would help with the level writer satisfaction just a bit and it would be free or at least very, very low in cost. But since there are a lot of free things they could be doing to increase writer satisfaction, I doubt they'll do that, either.
That's too bad for us writers.
However, this stats issue seems fairly new. Is it not? I don't think it has been beaten to death. And it's not the horse dying that I'm worried about -- it's the site dying.
Just my opinion.
The stats issue is at least 8 months old because I've seen forum posts about it in my feed since maybe a few weeks after I joined. There were even a few "I'm leaving HP" threads that claimed they were the last straw. Being a Squidoo transfer, I remember replying to one of them that it was no worse than the stat bugs and update issues Squidoo had.
by CCahill 8 years ago
How many page views does it take to create $1 ?Now; I realist that page views and hub revenue is not 100% directly proportionate, however I wondered what people found is generally the average revenue generated from a certain amount of page views, I have a rough idea it might be around;400 pages...
by PermissionGiver 9 years ago
First, please forgive me if this has been asked a hundred times already. I've tried searching through the forums, but without a better search feature, it's difficult to find out if someone has already asked about the same problem I'm having. The only thing that came close was "KNOWN ISSUE:...
by Cowboy Tom 8 years ago
The data collecting is so far off it's a joke. I've looked at may page views daily on this particular profile, and they have been consistently above a specific level every day. Without any apparent reason they have been so adjusted and/or revised, it appears it is a technical glitch. They've been...
by Jiwan 12 years ago
Well guys, Firstly i am sorry if i am posting this thread in wrong section. I think this is the proper section for this thread.Actually, i am analyzing the page impressions and page views of all of my live hubs and its significantly increasing day per day. But, the fact is, page impressions shown...
by Lisa Vollrath 5 years ago
Since I migrated here from Squidoo two months ago, I've seen a steady stream of threads in this forum, complaining about lost page views. There are a lot of theories about why it's happening, and how much it's happening, and what can be done to get into Google's good graces.Google is not my #1...
by Andrew Spacey 3 years ago
Am I reading the stats correctly? Have I missed something? Over night CPM has virtually halved, impressions doubled and earnings slightly raised! Is this a glitch or a fundamental shift in management?
Copyright © 2025 The Arena Media Brands, LLC and respective content providers on this website. HubPages® is a registered trademark of The Arena Platform, Inc. Other product and company names shown may be trademarks of their respective owners. The Arena Media Brands, LLC and respective content providers to this website may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website.
Copyright © 2025 Maven Media Brands, LLC and respective owners.
As a user in the EEA, your approval is needed on a few things. To provide a better website experience, hubpages.com uses cookies (and other similar technologies) and may collect, process, and share personal data. Please choose which areas of our service you consent to our doing so.
For more information on managing or withdrawing consents and how we handle data, visit our Privacy Policy at: https://corp.maven.io/privacy-policy
Show DetailsNecessary | |
---|---|
HubPages Device ID | This is used to identify particular browsers or devices when the access the service, and is used for security reasons. |
Login | This is necessary to sign in to the HubPages Service. |
Google Recaptcha | This is used to prevent bots and spam. (Privacy Policy) |
Akismet | This is used to detect comment spam. (Privacy Policy) |
HubPages Google Analytics | This is used to provide data on traffic to our website, all personally identifyable data is anonymized. (Privacy Policy) |
HubPages Traffic Pixel | This is used to collect data on traffic to articles and other pages on our site. Unless you are signed in to a HubPages account, all personally identifiable information is anonymized. |
Amazon Web Services | This is a cloud services platform that we used to host our service. (Privacy Policy) |
Cloudflare | This is a cloud CDN service that we use to efficiently deliver files required for our service to operate such as javascript, cascading style sheets, images, and videos. (Privacy Policy) |
Google Hosted Libraries | Javascript software libraries such as jQuery are loaded at endpoints on the googleapis.com or gstatic.com domains, for performance and efficiency reasons. (Privacy Policy) |
Features | |
---|---|
Google Custom Search | This is feature allows you to search the site. (Privacy Policy) |
Google Maps | Some articles have Google Maps embedded in them. (Privacy Policy) |
Google Charts | This is used to display charts and graphs on articles and the author center. (Privacy Policy) |
Google AdSense Host API | This service allows you to sign up for or associate a Google AdSense account with HubPages, so that you can earn money from ads on your articles. No data is shared unless you engage with this feature. (Privacy Policy) |
Google YouTube | Some articles have YouTube videos embedded in them. (Privacy Policy) |
Vimeo | Some articles have Vimeo videos embedded in them. (Privacy Policy) |
Paypal | This is used for a registered author who enrolls in the HubPages Earnings program and requests to be paid via PayPal. No data is shared with Paypal unless you engage with this feature. (Privacy Policy) |
Facebook Login | You can use this to streamline signing up for, or signing in to your Hubpages account. No data is shared with Facebook unless you engage with this feature. (Privacy Policy) |
Maven | This supports the Maven widget and search functionality. (Privacy Policy) |
Marketing | |
---|---|
Google AdSense | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Google DoubleClick | Google provides ad serving technology and runs an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Index Exchange | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Sovrn | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Facebook Ads | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Amazon Unified Ad Marketplace | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
AppNexus | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Openx | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Rubicon Project | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
TripleLift | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Say Media | We partner with Say Media to deliver ad campaigns on our sites. (Privacy Policy) |
Remarketing Pixels | We may use remarketing pixels from advertising networks such as Google AdWords, Bing Ads, and Facebook in order to advertise the HubPages Service to people that have visited our sites. |
Conversion Tracking Pixels | We may use conversion tracking pixels from advertising networks such as Google AdWords, Bing Ads, and Facebook in order to identify when an advertisement has successfully resulted in the desired action, such as signing up for the HubPages Service or publishing an article on the HubPages Service. |
Statistics | |
---|---|
Author Google Analytics | This is used to provide traffic data and reports to the authors of articles on the HubPages Service. (Privacy Policy) |
Comscore | ComScore is a media measurement and analytics company providing marketing data and analytics to enterprises, media and advertising agencies, and publishers. Non-consent will result in ComScore only processing obfuscated personal data. (Privacy Policy) |
Amazon Tracking Pixel | Some articles display amazon products as part of the Amazon Affiliate program, this pixel provides traffic statistics for those products (Privacy Policy) |
Clicksco | This is a data management platform studying reader behavior (Privacy Policy) |