Why Squidoo Adsense Sharing Is Good For Lensmasters
I was going back over some of my payout records for squidoo and I realized something that made me do a very hard double take. I believe that it’s actually better for lensmasters and they make more money when squidoo uses the tiered adsense sharing program they currently have in place.
Before I explain why, here is a little terminology I’m going to use.
CPM - This is the amount of money you earn per 1,000 impressions.
I realized that on average, each month I am earning anywhere from $6-$10 CPM from the ads on squidoo. This is insanely high compared to anywhere else you can publish on the internet that I have found. In my experience a CPM of $2-$5 is considered very good. If you take away my highest traffic lens, I’m earning over a penny a visitor that comes to my lenses. wow!
I’m not saying this to brag, but instead to illustrate why the revenue sharing system that squidoo has set up is far superior to a system like Hub Pages where the impressions are split, not the revenue.
If you were able to use your own adsense code, you would only receive earnings based pretty much on the volume of your traffic, instead of the quality of your traffic. The current tier system means that your lens has to be judged to be of high quality as well as draw traffic in order to be rewarded. I truly believe that in the long term this is a win for both the lensmasters and for squidoo. As more and more high quality content drifts to the top (can you imagine the day when getting into the top 100,000 will be like getting into the top 100?) the amount squidoo can pay each month to these lenses will only increase as well (Imagine a top tier of $80 instead of $8 ).
I’m willing to listen to arguments as to why we should be able to use our own adsense code, but you are going to have to justify three things if you change the current adsense sharing system that squidoo uses:
1) Does your system make $8-$10 CPM?
2) How do you prevent click fraud if users are allowed to input their own accounts?
3) That’s it. Just two things I decided.
So? Is Squidoo’s adsense sharing the best way? or is there another way?
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Comments
I personally agree that this system is good for top lensmasters. It’s certainly good for me… I’m not sure it’s fair on lensmasters who get traffic on their lens, and decent click throughs, but nobody voting on their lenses. It’s clear that they would probably be better off publishing elsewhere.
But the system does promote quality - which it obviously needs to do. And it also promotes variety, because as lensmasters we don’t have to worry about finding a high ecpm niche.
For me the ECPM is not as high as you describe - and roughly equals my website: not bad considering that we on average get only 50%. I guess it depends on how highly your lenses rank whether it’s good for you. But I agree that this system rewards fair play.
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Thanks for the insight here. I Dugg it:
http://digg.com/business_finance/Why_Squidoo_Adsense_Sharing_Is_Good_For_Lensmasters
Thanks also for the chat advice!