In your opinion is my next step to get more traffic or try to make more $ off the trafic I already have?

I do not think this is a binary thing. You should put the focus on getting more (quality) traffic which is harder to achieve IMO. At the same time you should optimize your revenue by blocking MFAs and finetuning ad layout, placement and colors.

Your $ figures look okay to me. I would be worried about the "swings" that you notice. It should be a bit more solid IMO.

Please mzanzig, what is this “blocking MFAs”? The other thing that you mention about getting more quality traffic has been part of my job in the last years.

Is anyone making $50 + per day from 150,000 page views a month (5000 per day) or is that too much to expect?

as an informal poll how many page views per month (or day) did it take you all to reach $50 per day.

Just wondering.

relative to me, your performance is absolutely stellar, so might I ask how long it took you to get Organic traffic to 5,000 page views per day

And is that 5000 as measured by adsense statistics?

Please, what do you mean with MFA?

Thanks

Focus on more traffic and once you start earning above $100+ per day the $15 swings will become $30-$60 swings, hehe.

AdSense is generally not stable. It's subject to many forces outside of your control. Concentrate on growing your traffic. If you feel you've maxed out your niche, try growing vertically or horizontally. Think of the DMOZ categories and go up or across a branch.

I think you should just keep building the site the way you would if it wasn't for AdSense to keep the traffic up, and to grow it as much as the niche allows. Then think about what other sorts of sites you might be interested in starting.

My site gets 13,000 unique visitors and 40,000 page views *a day* and we're only making about 3x what you have reported here.
Our Adsense is only a secondary thing on our site but your figures tell me we could be doing much better.

For me, getting rid of MFAs increased EPC up to 40%. Search this forum for more information on MFAs - there is a wealth of quality information here, as this is a very popular discussion topic.

The most important step in starting getting rid of MFAs is to use the official Google Preview Tool to see which ads are showing on your site and to see the landing pages.

Thanks for the info.

I am happy with the performance and am in no way complaining.

I was able to increase traffic by 10% this month with one link exchange with a semi-competitor.. looking for more opportunities now.

I'm not sure there is anything you can do to bring in more traffic or make more money from that one site. After all, in your first sentence, you state that it is a niche hobby site. By definition, it is going to have a limited audience.

I have to disagree with this. Niche hobby sites, especially when they're as lucrative as the one in question, are usually quite easy to grow traffic-wise by expanding subject-wise. For example, a site about "Pirate Memory Games" might add sections about other types of memory games, books about improving your memory, online memory tests, pirate collectibles, pirate movies, pirate books, and on and on and on... Little by little you'll begin to pick up new visitors who are interested in the related topics, and will click on the related topics' ads.

My question was just to see if everyone was going to say "jeeze with that traffic you should be doing twice that income". But it sounds like Im maximizing my site about as best as I can. I will continue to watch for MFA's and build traffic.

Thanks so much for the help.

P.S. Filtering "Made For Ads" web sites can become a full time job if you let it. Don't let this take time away from more important issues, growing your traffic.

P.S. Filtering "Made For Ads" web sites can become a full time job if you let it.

Fortunately, Google set a physical limit to this exhausting activity - 200 slots, and that's it. Once these are filled, the busy webmaster (or webmistress) can go back developing their sites. ;-)

Arghhh!

so, even the sites that paid more to advertise on your site, can now pay less, anyway, I am hardly use my exclude list, but then again, I don't know enough

good luck