Does Digg's AdSense Revenue Debunk My CTR Theory?

Yesterday's post on the AdSense click through rates of Digg users drew some interesting comments, including this one from Haf, where he points out that Digg's founder, Kevin Rose, is the second largest AdSense money maker:

Hang on a sec:

Top 8 google adsense (individual) money makers (excluding major network site):

as of 9/26/06 from johnchow.com

1: Markus Frind: PlentyOfFish.com - $300,000 per month
2: Kevin Rose: Digg.com - $250,000 per month
3: Jeremy Schoemaker - $140,000 per month
4: Jason Calacanis: Weblogs, Inc. - $120,000 per month
5: David Miles Jr. & Kato Leonard - $100,000 per month
7: Joel Comm - $24,000 per month
8: Shawn Hogan – DigitalPoint.com $10,000 per month

I think - for now - Google can certainly go to sleep knowing that people do click... a lot.

That's a very great point, but I don't think it disproves my theory, and here is a graph that I believe shows why:

The Page Views report from Alexa comparing Digg (in blue) with PlentyOfFish (in red) shows that Digg serves a LOT¹ more page views than PlentyOfFish.com. Yet PlentyOfFish makes more money off Adsense. In fact, some quick eyeballing leads me to believe that PlentyOfFish makes at least twice as much per page view as Digg does.

How much a site makes per page view can depend on a lot of things, including ad placement, page topics, and - as we've discussed here - audience.

1. It's probably safe to assume that Digg users are more likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed than PlentyOfFish users, so the difference probably isn't as significant as Alexa reports.

Interesting stats Ed. Thanks for posting my comment. What I find more interesting is knowing that there are only a handful of people who make any real cash from Adsense. Any individual website owner not on that list may only make a extra a month from it. Are we at saturation?

US represents about 40% of traffic to plentyoffish. Quantcast shows that digg isn't even in the same league.

Most ranking systems show that Plentyoffish serves 4 times the pageviews as digg on any given day.

Required fields marked with: *
Name*:

Email Address*:

URL:
Remember personal info?

Comments*:

HTML Tags you can use in your posts:
<b>Bold</b> = Bold
<i>Italicized</i> = Italicized
<a href="http://www.othersite.com">Link to Other Site</a> = Link to Other Site

Please keep comments on-topic. Contact authors or other commenters
directly for off-topic conversations.

Notify me of future comments via e-mail

Technology Evangelist Digest - Free Newsletter

Sign up for the free Technology Evangelist Digest to receive daily updates, editorials, and practical advice on emerging technology trends in hardware, software, webware, marketing and beyond.

Technology Evangelist Digest will keep you up to date on the technology trends that will help make you more productive and efficient both in business and your personal life.

Let's face it: If you made it to this line, you must have found something valuable on this page, right? Think about how cool it would be to have something free and interesting to read every day from Technology Evangelist by signing up today.

1. Fill in your email below,
2. Then click on the confirmation email you receive.
3. That's it. Your first Technology Evangelist Digest will arrive within 24 hours.