Alex Pooley’s Blog

I have a number of random projects out there in the cloud. Being a professional web developer, I have the resources to build all sorts of junk and then set it free. Here’s a result from one of my experiments that you may find interesting.

A couple of years ago I built a site that mashed a lot of data together to generate over 100,000 web pages. The site is genuinely useful, but it’s very minimal with maybe between 30-70 words per page. The aim of the project was to generate so many pages that it would cater for the long tail. This is a common technique among the gray and black hatters out there. Unlike most of their sites, I performed a lot of custom back end work that created actual unique content, and not just madlib and/or aggregation of RSS/ATOM feeds.

Below you can see the chart of unique traffic from the sites birth, through to now.

Analytics of niche site from birth to now

Traffic grew constantly over the first few months as the search engines (mainly Google) began to index the site. Unfortunately, the site was relatively unstable due to the improper use of a full text fuzzy search engines (Sphinx). As a result, I speculate that I began to fall out of favor with Google and traffic came to a screeching halt. From memory the unique hits went from about 300+ per day, down to single digits. After one year Google turned the juice back on, and the site is now receiving back up to 300 unique hits per day. The site is also much more stable and I’m hoping to stay in the good books this time.

While the site was down and out I improved the data immensely to bring the total number of pages on the site to over 3 million. I’m sure Google is still indexing these new pages.

Here’s a close up of the traffic for just over the last year…

Google turning off the tap

Adsense performance has been mediocre – in line with the pattern of traffic. The total revenue for the site to date has been a meagre $74.33. The site took many hours to build. I didn’t measure, but I’d estimate 40 hours. The eCPM is a pretty steady $2.50 – $3.50. Since the start of this month (just over one week ago) the site has earned $13.66 which is showing some promise, but obviously it’s still small time.

Adsense revenue since the start of April

As far as learning experiences go, I’d say this has been a useful exercise. The most important lesson has been to drop sole dependence on the search engines for future projects. If you plan on going this route for revenue generation, prepare to depend on Google’s good graces and hedge your bets accordingly. Overall, I think there’s potential in this avenue of income generation, but it’s not really to my liking. Maybe something a bit more formulaic would be a better approach. That said, I’m curious to see what happens in the next few months given that the site is 30 times larger than it was previously, and Google has decided to send traffic my way once again.