Earnings Report -- Which Pays More: Google Adsense or the Hubpages Ad Program?
© 2012 by Aurelio Locsin.
Aside from the Ebay and Amazon affiliate programs, the primary source of income for most hubbers comes from ads produced by either HubPages or Google Adsense. I was curious as to which program would generate the most income so I conducted an experiment.
Program Differences
I turned the HubPages Ad Program off in April 2012 to see what would happen. (This was many months after the Google Panda update that disrupted the earnings of so many.)
- All the ads came from Google Adsense and occupied only four positions of my hub.
- Three of the positions were the same as in the HubPages Ad Program: the top header, the top of the right sidebar and the first ad space in the content area. The fourth space at the bottom of the left content area was also the same, although this was smaller than the HubPages version.
- Missing were two ads in the middle of the left content area and the bottom of the right sidebar.
Results
The table reveals the results from March, with the HubPages Ad Program turned on, and April, with the HubPages Ad Program turned off. I’m including Ebay Revenue earnings as additional information. I only added two more hubs in April, so the number of views would remain the same.
Description
| March 2012 (HubPages)
| April 2012 (Adsense)
|
|---|---|---|
HubPages Views
| 30,000
| 26,000
|
Adsense Views
| 11,271
| 15,215
|
HubPages Ads
| $112.54
| $6.99
|
Adsense Ads
| $5.53
| $62.00
|
Ebay Revenue
| $3.78
| $4.01
|
Total Revenue
| $121.85
| $72.99
|
According to HubPages, my page views went down in April, which was to be expected because of the lack of new articles. However, according to Adsense, my page views actually went up, which I cannot figure out.
Earnings
My earnings in March were nearly 65 percent more than the earnings in April, primarily because of the HubPages Ad Program income.
- HubPages offers a strong advantage in paying by the number of views. Even if a visitor stays on a hub for just a few seconds, he generates some income. I consistently earned from $3 to $6 dollars a day with the HubPages program turned on.
- Google Adsense pays only if someone clicks an ad. That means even if you have thousands of visitors, you don’t get a penny if they don’t click anything. There were many days without any income. Note that even with the HubPages Program turned off, it still paid me almost $7 for the month.
The bottom line is that the HubPages Ad Program pays far more than Google Adsense by itself.
So I’m going to keep the HubPages Ad program turned on from now on.
Clarifications
Let me clarify a couple of points that seem to be causing some confusion:
- The HubPages Ad Program does pay when somebody clicks on an ad, but most of the income comes from views. I'm estimating $4 - $5 per thousand impressions on my hubs.
- Google Adsense also pays for impressions but on the order of a penny or two for several thousand views. Most of the income is in the clicks. I can't say the amount of money per click because that would violate Adsense terms of service.
