It’s coming to the end of December, and us SEO types have (mostly) just finished riding the RPM high of Black Friday until shipping windows for Christmas slowly trickle close. It’s a dark time moving into the holiday season, watching your traffic & session income dive off a cliff. It can even get a little bit depressing until you look at the big picture, but I always like to say:
When in doubt, zoom out!
Luckily instead of improving your page speed score, our friends at Ezoic have developed an excellent tool called the Ezoic Ad Index.
Note for another topic: Because display advertising websites are passive income with a Net 30-Net 65+ payout and do not have physical assets/costs, they are an excellent hedge against inflation.
As you can see from the data that they have on every December since the beginning of time (2017), we are about to jump headfirst off of an RPM cliff.
Why that’s not so bad!
We always bounce back. The Ad Revenue Index is graded on a curve, with the highest ad index day ever serving as 100. This means that although you can expect your income per user to drop by nearly 50% in most niches, you’ll quickly bounce back, and the lowest day in 2022 will be much higher than the lowest day in 2021 (barring anything unforeseen).
Example Data:
Using one of my money sites as an example, I peaked on November 26 at $28.53 Session RPM near American Thanksgiving, and this has slowly continued downwards past:
Cyber Monday ($25.53)
December 5 ($20.92)
December 12 ($18.75)
December 19 ($16.80)
& I’ve mentally prepared myself for it to fall even further.
This did a number on my motivation the first time it happened, but it doesn’t need to – as long as you expect it. January – April you’re likely to make less per user than you are now, and that’s ok. You’ll still be making more than you were last year, and by the time Christmas rolls around for 2022, you can expect income to be higher than it is now.
Ok, we’ve dealt with the loss of income. But what about loss of traffic?
This one hurts even more because it can also start dropping heavily before Christmas. With so many people off work, shopping online, and spending time at home, why are fewer people viewing MY website?
Every website can have a seasonal component to it, and most niches drop during the holidays. Here’s a look at a few of the most popular through Google Trends:
Each of these is the last full year that we have data for – 2020
Technology
This has been trending downwards over the last five years as people become savvier and search for specifics. You can see the December drop is quite pronounced from ~75 to just above 50, it doesn’t look it on the chart, but this could be a 33% reduction in traffic.
Investing
Surprisingly Investing maintains its slump for a few months into the New Year.
Hosting
The December drop for ‘Hosting’ is quite pronounced from 85-51 before recovering in the New Year as users look to start new businesses.
Weight Loss
This niche has a similar early December drop before spiking before New Year’s resolutions, so if you have a niche in this industry, congratulations! You’ve avoided the doldrums.
Some niches recover faster than others, but traffic will slump across the board (even fitness come December 25). If you let this little ‘blip’ negatively impact your motivation, then you’ll miss the boat when your income starts rising. It’s always easy to work on your websites when they are growing and raking in cash, but to succeed, you’ll want to use these down/plateau periods to optimize and build out your content even further. Then when you’re in peak season, you’ll have done everything you can to squeeze out every dollar.
*Note – While I may be harsh on Ezoic and I don’t recommend them for larger publishers or those who are close to meeting the minimum requirements for Mediavine/Ad Thrive. However, I will say that if you need to monetize your blog now they will improve your RPM significantly over Adsense.
References –
adrevenueindex.ezoic.com
trends.google.com