If you have a quality blog, and you don’t mind earning a few dollars on the side, you should start thinking about website monetization. Unless, you are blogging purely for fun, or hobby, or you abhor ads messing up your site design, or you don’t care about any extra cash, at all.
For those regular folks like the iSensey team, we maintain websites and produce contents because this to us is work. Work that puts food on the table. Thank you, online opportunities!
So how do you choose what advertising platform to use on your blog? What ads will best fit your niche, your topics, your target readers?
*To disclose iSensey currently implement mainly Google Adsense and a few units of Media.net.
There are lots of things to consider, but for newbies, this we say – being new is a perfect time to experiment with different ad networks. After testing, choose the one that gives you the highest revenue or the one that gives you the most flexibility as to ad unit placement, or the one that matches your site and needs perfectly.
Monetization Experience
On our pioneering sites (not iSensey), the earliest gigs were from sponsored contents and from direct advertisers. For Philippine-based online ads company, we used Nuffnang. Then Adsense, then Media.net. Some online publisher colleagues favors Innity and Ambient Digital for local ads.
We’ve stopped Nuffnang ads from running on our sites, and have stayed away from sponsored contents and direct sold ads, unless a fantastic offer comes our way. Currently, our online publishing network uses Adsense and Media.net, but the latter only runs on 2 sites.
*You may also notice there are tons of Filipino-based websites that also serves MGID ads.
This 2017, a ‘new’ advertising platform emerged for Philippine-based web admins. Bloggers are scrambling to register, get approval and implement Instant Articles with Facebook Ad Networks.
Facebook Gunning After Google Adsense
Google Adsense is the giant in the “easy to implement ad units” in online advertising that pays good. Getting in, however, is the real challenge. Your site must comply with all the quality guidelines of Google, before your site is allowed into their advertising program.
This year, Facebook Instant Article (IA) and Audience Network (FAN) is getting huge, some have even switched their monetization away from Google to Facebook, because FAN is paying exceptionally well for their niches!
IA and FAN started a year or two ago among US, UK, AUS, western country based website owners, they were the first adapters. It is only lately that Facebook Advertising Network is gaining traction in the Philippines and it is becoming huge especially among blogs focus on viral niches, entertainment, health, alternative medicines, current events and news, Duterte topics, trending topics, etc. Some pinoy bloggers are killing it with Facebook ads revenue, triple digit daily earning is possible! Really!
Because we were seeing amazing results of blogger colleagues and friends, we got motivated to try it out. We hope we will duplicate their success on our sites too.
FACEBOOK EARNINGS – Amaaaazing!!!
Thanks to a friend who is also a colleague in online publishing, iSensey got hold of an actual Facebook Invoice for advertisement earnings last August 2017, paid this September 2017. So we updated this post today September 23 with the real earnings from FB screenshot.
Is it true? Can you earn in Facebook? YES!!!
How much was wired to this colleague’s bank account? USD 9K++! One website earning that much! WOW!!! Great work to this online publisher! See the evidence!
We can’t help but compare it to the Invoice we got from FB for the same period, a measly USD 3.07 haha. Puede pang-candy but we can’t get it for the FB threshold for payment is USD100. 😀
Some pinoy bloggers are really earning huge with FB instant article and facebook audience network ads. Hopefully, tayo na susunod!
The usual payment of Facebook Audience Network is around 19th to 21st of the following month for the earnings of the previous month. Usual payment methods use by Philippine based publishers are via paypal or direct deposit / wire transfer to bank account.
Facebook Audience Network Nightmare Set-up
For non-techie people like us (yes, we own a blog network but we are not programmers, we don’t have an IT or computer background, we don’t eat and breath codes, we are barely managing on the tech front, lol), registering for Facebook Instant Article and implementing Facebook Audience Network ads was stress personified. Haha. But because we really want to experiment so we’ll know with certainty if this new earning opportunity matches us well, we dig in the FAN set-up battlefield, and finally, after about 10 days of wrestling with the implementation guidelines, we emerged victorious. We got approved! Including IA and FAN for iSensey. 🙂
Then we have to repeat the vicious cycle on the next websites we set-up for Facebook IA and FAN. 🙂
*We used the plugin Instant Article for WP by Automattic, Dekode, Facebook. Download the plugin here.
Running Ads and Performance Result
Once your site passed the review process and your application for Instant Article and Facebook Audience Network is approved, you then need to start publishing your Instant Articles to make it go live. Once the IA posts are live and shared on your FB page or wherever in Facebookland, you will begin to see the performance of this ad platform. Earnings result per site will be shown too, how much you’ll earn depends on a lot of things.
Sadly, FAN is not for us. We were making pennies instead of the triple-digit earnings we wished for. Just see the daily earning on this screenshot for a Facebook Audience Network:
We continued to use Facebook Ads for 3 sites for about 45 days, the time it took us to hit the cumulative $100 FAN payment threshold.
As of now, we left only 4 Live Instant Articles, apprehensive to unpublished all IA posts, we might not be able to get the pending payment from Facebook if we do so. Once we get the FAN payment, we’ll turn-off Facebook Ad Network. We might revisit this online earning opportunity when we have websites that are a potential good match with this advertising platform.
Based Decisions on Actual Data, Hard Facts
“Will it work for us?”
“We are on the same niche, we will probably earn the same range if we follow their lead”
“Is it effective for our sites?”
“Is it worth switching Adsense to Facebook ads?”
“What’s the best monetization option?”
“What’s the best strategy?”
Questions. One strategy to know the answer – TRY IT. IMPLEMENT. EVALUATE THE RESULT.
Be inspired and get motivated from the results generated by other people, yes, but don’t just stop there. Stop the second guessing. Do the work. Experiment. Test it live. That is the only way to know if something will work well for your sites or not.
Actual experience, actual implementation, actual result.
With real data on hand, you will be on better ground in assessing the best ads to use on your blogs and websites moving forward.
We are done with the experiment, iSensey and our other sites are truly back in the arms of Adsense. We love you GA! Update: We might be back Facebook and try again with Audience Network ads. Hopefully, it’ll be sweeter the second time around. 😀
For more of iSensey posts on blogging, seo, and website strategies, you can check out the Category/Blogging. Thanks!