FreeVintageIllustrations.com
A collection of free illustrations from the public domain.
When I picked up this site, had good traffic but wasn't running ads.
In order to start monetizing I hooked up Ezoic. AdSense is a joke, and I didn't have enough pageviews for Mediavine. I've been using Ezoic for another one of my sites (http://manscipated.com) and have had good results. So I gave it a shot.
It was a bit tricky to figure out how to carve ad units onto the site without degrading the user experience too much. The previous owner (who was VERY helpful) had a couple of tricky Wordpress templates that made inserting ads a bit difficult - even with Ezoic's awesome Chrome Extensions. I had to hire some help from one of my VAs to get the ad units to show up properly.
It paid off immediately. Ad revenue started rolling in, and this site is now on track to make its money back in just 8 months. Sometimes it really is as easy as flipping on a switch.
My next step will be to hook up with Printify and add an Ecommerce store to the site.
If you want to run ads on your site, I highly recommend using Ezoic instead of AdSense!
I picked up freevintageillustrations.com because it had good traffic but wasn't running any ads. It's a huge repository of illustrations in the public domain (i.e., non-copyrighted) that has hundreds of unique page views per day, and ranks extremely well in Google.
I did almost no due diligence on this one. I knew it looked good and made an offer on the spot based solely on this. Plus my wife is an artist, so this was an added bonus.
The seller accepted my offer, and I immediately hooked the site up to Ezoic.com to start monetizing it. This took about 2 hours.
It's already earning about $60/month, or $720/year. So it's on track to make its money back in just over 12 months. Sometimes it really is as easy as flipping on a switch!
I think my next step here is to add a simple ecommerce store. I was looking through blog comments and noticed a lot of people were asking if they could buy prints, greeting cards, etc with these images. So I'm going to start researching some print-on-demand companies and hook up WooCommerce to set up a dropship operation for extra revenue.
More to come!
14 Comments
I lost credibility on your points about ezoic vs adsense the moment i saw your affiliate link at the bottom.
You kidding? Of course I’m going to use my affiliate link. Their affiliate payouts are incredible! You think AdSense has an affiliate program? Heck no 😂
2020.... I thought ads should be a bit more relevant than 30 years before but nothing changed...
To be honest, I'm totally confused - what's the point to show 100% irrelevant ads? Why would companies throw their money?
Oh man, ads are still relevant as ever. How do you think Google makes all its money! :)
Companies pay for either impressions, clicks, or both. 100% irrelevant ads is not going to make any money for anyone. Ezoic is great because it's an AI-driven platform that gets smarter over time.
So ads become more relevant over time, and you make a higher RPM (or EPMV as they call it) over time.
I have a feeling I was not clear enough... that's exactly my point - 100% of ads I see are IRrelevant. That's why I wonder - how the hell they make money if they show irrelevant ads?
Not sure what you mean - over time, on one website?
Yeah - Ezoic is the technology that decides to serve which ad, from which publisher, via which ad unit on the page, to which audience or end user.
I am sorry, but is is still a bad UX...
Oh don't be sorry - the UX is pretty awful. I'm optimizing for revenue right now, not UX. UX will come later.
It's all about knowing your audience. The average person who visits this site is a 55-65 year old grandma, not a savvy 25-year old tech worker.
As much as poor UX pains me, the audience could care less about it.
Looks like the site is running Ads by Google, did you go back to AdSense?
Nah, Ezoic is a publishing platform, not an ad network (like Mediavine). Ads from Google and other ad networks get pumped through Ezoic.
Aha, thanks for the clarification.
I decided to apply to Mediavine after reading this post. Future will tell if it can beat AdSense for my project.
Oh man, if you qualify for Mediavine it will absolutely beat AdSense, no question about it. Their RPMs are up to 100% higher!
But their qualifications have gone up recently. You now need 50k pageviews/month to qualify.
It's 50k sessions and not pageviews, but that's not a problem either, the site has got some decent traffic.
I'm worried that Mediavine will only perform good for English speaking market, and that's only about 30% of the visitors. I also use ads in AdSense matched content that performs well better than other ads.
It worth a try at least :)
Ah, very interesting. Hadn’t thought about the international angle. Curious as to how it goes. Good luck!