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EricGiguere.com > AdSense FAQ > AdSense Earnings
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How much can you earn with AdSense?

Not surprisingly, this is one of the most common questions that website owners ask when they're considering the AdSense program. There are two answers to this question: "as much as you want" and "not as much as you think". Contradictory answers? Not really.

You can earn as much as you want with AdSense

AdSense is a huge moneymaker for some sites. There have been verified reports of sites making more than US$10,000 a day from AdSense. That's a lot of money!

However, the sites that make this kind of money are few and far between. They are high-traffic sites within niches that advertisers crave. If you're getting tens or hundreds of thousands of visitors on a daily basis, it's fairly easy to make decent money from that traffic.

If you can build a high-traffic site, you can literally earn as much as you want using AdSense. Or other advertising programs. But that's a tough, tough thing to do.

You won't earn as much as you think with AdSense

The reality is that most sites earn much, much less with AdSense, mostly because their traffic numbers are so low — even if they're in a competitive niche.

Think about it. Say you have a 5% clickthrough rate (CTR) on your AdSense ads, which is a fairly average number. That means that out of every 100 visitors to your site (actual visitors, not search engine crawlers or other automated systems), 5 of them click an ad. Say the niche you're in is competitive and you average $0.25 per click. That means you make $1.25 per hundred visitors. If you get 500 visitors per day, that's a whopping $6.25 per day, or $187.50 per month. That's more than enough to pay your domain and hosting fees, but it's not enough to live on.

But what if you're in an obscure, non-competitive niche and the average per-click value you see is only $0.05? Then you're making only $1.25 per day, or $37.50 per month. Ouch!

Traffic is the key to your AdSense earnings. Yes, you can optimize ad placement to increase your CTR and choose better keywords to get more money per click, but if you only have a few hundred visitors per day you won't make a lot of money with AdSense. It's simple mathematics!

If you want to make a lot of money with AdSense, get lots of traffic to your sites. Build one or two high-traffic sites (easier said than done) or build lots of medium-traffic sites (which has its own challenges).

Comments or questions about this AdSense FAQ entry? Leave them on the Unofficial AdSense FAQ for discussion.

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