Hey Gio

A nosedive CPM drop is something I never thought would happen. When I started publishing sites a few years ago, the agenda was to rank and keep ranking. The higher the CPM, the more competitive the industry. Since my goal is sustainability anyway, I went after a pretty competitive yet undeserved niche.

Everything was done best of breed – from design to content quality. Another reason I started the site was to warn a family member about the risks involved with this niche. That led to the creation of a graphic tool like no other.

It was a fair trade-off with the search engines where I enhanced user experience and attracted organic links. No black hat techniques were performed. I was subtle with the ads, there were no pop-ups, cookies or spyware.

I began to get some traffic, things were good and dandy until the beginning of this year…

A 70 percent drop from last year’s average CPM can really sting revenue. It was something I never prepared for because CPM varied by industry and remained a constant. Page impressions and click through rates were the two variables of concern once a vertical is targeted. It’s beginning to not be the case because now we have to factor in micro-economic trends that may affect advertiser’s budgets.

I got lazy and left my daily contacts on for two days. When I finally removed them, the right lens dried out so bad that it ripped off the tear producing membrane of my right eye. Although my eye was pinkish, it really wasn’t pink eye. Maybe I had a lazy eye. Get it? Har har.

This strange and somewhat painful incident led me to appreciate the significance of vision. It was really tough driving with one eye covered.