My AdSense CPM dropped 30% this week, I started to feel the recession impact on my websites – more traffic but much lower income. It’s kinda scary to imagine how bad it will be in the future.
Several years ago, I always encouraged my friends to start a website if they were interested. It wasn’t hard to earn some money at that time, many webmasters have several dozen websites. But it’s very different now, I will tell him it’s very difficult to earn money online if someone asks me. Recession is only one of the reasons, changes on Google side make small websites hard to survive (or grow, more accurately).
When you search something on Google, wikipedia.org is often on the first page for almost anything. This means Google gives authoritative websites very heavy weight on rankings. This change has been spread into all fields. In a niche topic, there are a couple of authority websites which takes over most SE traffic, it becomes very hard for other small websites. So, either your website is quite successful or it can only buy you several hamburgers. There is no doubt that it’s extremely hard to gain the authority status from Google.
Should you start a website? If you want to earn money, think it again, you need to have a very solid long-term plan. If you do it for personal interest, do it, you can get free hosting everywhere, it’s also very cheap to use you own domain name and commercial hosting. $10/month would be the maximum cost.
I have put ads on every possible websites, also plan to shutdown some garbage websites. I can see many many websites will disappear in this cold winter.