Part 3: Corona and my advertising revenue losses

After I have already reported in Part 1 and Part 2 about how the advertising revenues through Corona have collapsed and I then even went over to selling premium accesses, now follows Part 3. A lot has happened again about which I now want to inform.

Things were looking good at the end of August and beginning of September. After I spent time optimising the advertising blocks of TheMoneytizer, the income also increased again. I was really happy about that, but unfortunately it only lasted until mid-September:

Around 14 September, however, there was a break. The revenue per 1 million ads increased rapidly (blue line), but the actual revenue generated per day dropped (red bars). This means that we have quality ad space, but our ad network operator can't find anyone who wants to book it. Therefore, the ads on minecraft-server.eu are often empty at the moment. In my own experiments, the ad banners are only displayed on every 6 page views, which means the other 5 page views don't bring in any ad revenue. This is a huge imbalance where money is lost that cannot be compensated by even more ads.

Fill rate not reached

In the advertising industry, this is referred to as the fill rate. The optimum would be a 100% fill rate, which would mean that advertising is displayed for every page view. This is how it has been for us most of the time. With 5 out of 6 empty page views, we have a fill rate of 16.7%, which is a disaster. Accordingly, the most qualitative advertising spaces are of no use to us if they simply remain empty. I wrote this to the support of TheMoneytizer, unfortunately only unspecific answers came back, which did not help me. It has to be said that there were two changes at TheMoneytizer during this period: The connected ad networks were expanded and the check whether a Consent Banner is installed was tightened, because Google became stricter here, too, I described my problems with it and how I could solve them here. TheMoneytizer also referred to these circumstances, which did not satisfy me. So I looked at it for a few days, as I have already learned in the past the ad market can be something very dynamic, making a rash one day and reacting completely differently the next. But after nothing changed and I was annoyed that over 80% of the page views did not show any advertising, which would have meant my ruin in the long run, I became active yesterday, 25 September.

We need our own ad server

There are now several ways to ensure that the remaining 80% of the page views are also provided with advertising. The best, but also most complex method is to write a script that checks whether the advertising space could be filled via TheMoneytizer and if not, to display another advertising provider. This solution is probably the best in the world. In the past, I could have made a few euros out of the advertising in this way. Nevertheless, I decided on a simpler variant that is not as exact: I installed my own ad server, the Revive AdServer. With such an ad server, it is possible to display different ad units on one advertising space, in the simplest case simply according to weighting - this is how I solved it.

If I want to weight something, I need a second advertising provider. I decided to use Google Adsense, which I had banned completely from my website just a few weeks ago. With Google Adsense, you can make very extensive optimisations to the advertisements with the aim of only playing out particularly lucrative advertisements. I deleted all these settings to get a clean start and also because I was no longer satisfied with Adsense, perhaps this was also due to these settings.

Then I set up my ad server in such a way that for the time being it should only fill one ad space (namely the ad in the right sidebar) 66% of the time with ads from TheMoneytizer and 33% with ads from Adsense. This is where the disadvantage of the more complex solution mentioned above becomes visible: In 66% of the cases, the ad server decides in favour of TheMoneytizer, even if TheMoneytizer cannot fill the ad block, which still happens, but now much less often because TheMoneytizer also gets 33% less advertising opportunities. The fill rate of Google Adsense is, as always, close to 100%.

I implemented the above scenario as a test on the evening of 25 September and have since observed a slight increase in advertising revenue with TheMoneytizer and also with Google Adsense. However, since today is only 26 September, the whole thing should still be viewed with a great deal of caution, since, as already written, this can change again very quickly.

What happens next?

The test is still running. I plan 7 to 10 days for it again. But I want to deliver another ad block via my new ad server and fill it alternately with ads from TheMoneytizer and Adsense to get a better test. Probably this will be the top ad block on the start page of minecraft-server.eu.

I hope I was able to show that the advertising industry is constantly changing and that you can basically permanently optimise your ads to make more profit or maybe you just have to do it if existing ads don't make money anymore. Although I have been earning money with it since 2011, these details are also new to me, as I have not been interested in optimising my adverts in this way in the last few years, and I am happy to share my experiences with you here. It is probably already certain that I will report on the success or failure of my test in part 4.