Adsense Earnings and the StumbleUpon Effect

One of my blog entries was picked up by the StumbleUpon community earlier this week. This is a report about the effects it had to my Adsense earnings.

StumbleUpon is a fun social networking toolbar that, through comparing your preferences with those of other like-minded surfers, serves you pages that ought to be of interest to you. It currently has over 1.3 million users, so there is enormous potential for unpaid traffic there.

On Friday 6th of October, my post on my favourite Firefox extensions was added to the StumbleUpon community. A few days earlier it had generated some traffic from Digg, but the number of visitors from that social networking site had considerably dropped by Thursday evening. My blog, one of the quiet sanctuaries in the web, generally only receives around a hundred page views a day, and Digg had been able to raise that to about two hundred a day for Wednesday and Thursday. It thus came as something of a surprise to find out on Friday evening that there had been over two thousand Adsense impressions on my blog on Friday.

Taking a look at my logs, it turned out that the traffic was coming from StumbleUpon. To cut the short story even shorter, the time period from Friday morning to Sunday morning (all times CET) saw more than seven thousand page views at my blog, almost exclusively concentrated on that one page about my favourite Firefox extensions, and with the exception of a couple of hundred visitors all being referred to from StumbleUpon. It was quite huge for me, as none of my websites had ever experienced anything like it.

I run Adsense ads on most of my sites. My visitor numbers being as low as they are, I don’t make a fortune out of them, but it is always nice to see that half a dollar or so I may get on a good day. It makes me happy. I was therefore eagerly anticipating for the traffic explosion to at least double my earnings, maybe even reach the magical three dollar amount for that day, about which I could then tell heroic stories to my brother’s grandchildren.

I should have known better. Social network users are, after all, notorious for their blindness to ads, and the topic of my Firefox post would obviously attract the most tech-savvy of them all. I am sorry to say, my brother’s grandchildren are left without stories.

So, what were the results? There were 7,117 views of the Firefox extensions article on Friday and Saturday. At the same time period, according to Adsense, there were 4,686 impressions of the ad unit specific to that page. What this means is that almost 2,500 StumbleUpon visitors blocked my ads with their browser (while I have no stats about what browsers these specific users use, I can seen that 90.3% of visitors to my blog have used Firefox — a figure that was more like 65% still a few weeks ago when I last checked). It also means that those who actually saw the ads, didn’t actually see them. Which, to be honest, I quite understand, as also I have become blind to Adsense ads.

As for my earnings, well, while Google prevents Adsense users from giving any exact data about their earnings, let me just say that the total earned on Friday and Saturday from my blog could not have been lower. Literally.

And the moral of the story? I don’t know. It was just fun to see that many visitors for once.