When you say you're now making $.30, is that "$.30 per click" or "$.30 per month"?

Free photo sites are very similar to gaming sites, forums, and joke sites. Your visitors are there for a very specific reason and are unlikely to be interested in ads.

Page eCPM is $0.38, Page CTR is 0.20%. (isn't this really low?) I agree about free photo site, but it shouldn't be so bad. There has to be a feasible alternative.

If traffic arrives at your site looking for free photos - it will be hard to persuade people to click on an ad instead!

Maybe having other content may help - e.g. camera reviews.

To increase your CTR you need to put yourself in the place of the visitor to your site - how does the visitor find the site, what are they looking for, what adverts may attract them, what content do I need to provide to attract those sort of ads?

Instead of the regular ad blocks, put together a block with some text pitching picasa, and include a picasa referral button. Try mixing them in and see what sort of results you get.

Thanks, the site has other really successful content besides photos, such as photo lessons and an active community. The advertisers that show up are good too- very relevant and reputable stock photo agencies but I can't really control majority of the ads because its a photo gallery. Seems to me the google method is not a good fit, I was hoping to find alternatives. I think maybe pounding pavement for advertisers. Why is it so hard to get a response from decent brokerages like doubleclick and Federated Media? I thought having 250,000 views and 16,000 unique with very targeted audience was worth something so I feel like I am doing something worng. Thanks for your help.

[Your visitors are there for a very specific reason and are unlikely to be interested in ads. ]

I disagree, I know of a free photo site which gets over $8.00 CPM.

Listen to what PENGI is saying, the key is to find out why visitors are coming to your site not the fact that the photos are free. you need to direct your marketing efforts away from the 'Free' part

"I've always made .60, this month its dropped to .30. "

I had the same experience this month - all my CPMs have halved. I wonder if it's just a bit of trend in the advertisers out there at the moment. I've noticed much less quality in the ads being served on my site also - which I'm trying to adjust via competitive site filtering.

If you ahve different features to your site, set them up with individual channels you might find one section is doing well and lifting up your lower sections.

Then work on the worst parts, that brings the task back to bite sized pieces.

Change the layout and try several ad formats, even if you think that it looks weird.

Use the Adsense Channels to track/check what works.

[edited by: Biggus_D at 1:13 am (utc) on Mar. 10, 2007]

Thanks for all the usefull sugestions. I am going to try them but I am also going to try using adbrite.com and putting together a media kit, start approaching companies- I will try to post results to this thread.

Adbrite was easy to setup and allows me to keep the adsense until a better CPM comes through them- only problem is that its auto rate gave me $5 flat rate per day. This may correct itself after more data is collected by I set the rates manually based on average impressions. Also the 2 ads I got in the 2 days seemed like scams to me, but there is an approval process

Yes let us know how you go with Adbrite. I used them a while back and if you have a market that they have lots of sites for you will probably do ok. For me personally, I didn't find many of the ads appearing on my site very relevant. They paid OK CPC, but the CTR was very low due to the ads being about topics not associated with my site.

It is nice how they allow you to use adsense content that will only display if your target adbrite CPC is not met.