Why I left the content game, or Google’s declining EPC in the automatic identification industry

After leaving a position developing web-based products in the supply chain industry, I started a blog on automatic identification technology. The industry continues to draw substantial investment, and the site quickly drew an audience. In March of 2004, I affiliated with a small publishing group that had a number of similar websites. We had early success and what looked to be a clear path to sustained revenue from text ads. Despite consistent traffic and astronomical click through rates, the steady decline in our earnings-per-click doomed the format, and ultimately ended most of my involvement with the site.

After reading several webmasters’ stories of decreasing revenue from Google text ads, I decided to share my statistics.

The site will remain nameless to protect the ongoing business, although a casual search should reveal it if you’re curious.

The graphs are provided by the excellent Digital Point Solutions.

Note that I moved the ads to a different account in January of 2006, the final valley in the charts reflect that.
Earnings per click

Click-through rate

Total Earnings

(This graph is effectively the first two multiplied together, as traffic was relatively stable.)