Tightly focused sites have higher EPC?

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Tightly focused sites have higher EPC?

farmboy

3:03 pm on Jun 21, 2008 (gmt 0)

Consider this my throwing a theory against the wall to see if it sticks.

Over the long run, my sites that have a tightly focused topic seem to generate a higher EPC.

Hypothetical example - suppose I have a site about sports that includes sections about basketball, football, baseball and auto racing. Then I have a separate site about basketball only.

The basketball only site seems to consistently generate a higher EPC.

I realize there are lots of other factors to consider, but just by itself, the above seems to indicate it's better, from an AdSense earnings perspective, to have a series of tightly focused sites rather than one large site that encompasses a number of related topics.

Anyone else?

FarmBoy

HuskyPup

3:30 pm on Jun 21, 2008 (gmt 0)

I think that is supposedly the general opinion however just how StupidPricing (TM) actually decides this is altogether another matter.

martinibuster

6:00 pm on Jun 21, 2008 (gmt 0)

The hypothetical site about "sports that includes sections about basketball, football, baseball and auto racing" does well for me. I have several sites like this and there are always sections that do better than other sections but the site overall does better than sites I maintain that are more tightly focused.

Imo, this is an issue of content focus and inbound links influencing what your visitors are there for. Some of my highest traffic sections do the least well because they're just a bunch of freeloaders downloading PDFs etc.

Honestly, I don't think one style is better than the other or influences the AdSense performance directly.

joelgreen

8:21 pm on Jun 21, 2008 (gmt 0)

IMO "tightly focused" sites can indeed have better results, because of ad relevance. From my experience Google would often put football related ads on basketball section on multi-topic sites. One-topic site has less chances of displaying "offtopic" ads, so better targeting and better earnings. YMMV.

ecmedia

2:41 pm on Jun 23, 2008 (gmt 0)

My experience shows that it is the tightly focused page that is better than making a generalization about the site. A large website cannot be tightly focused. After a few dozen pages you are bound to reach out to related topics.

vero

4:04 pm on Jun 23, 2008 (gmt 0)

I think tightly focused is better.
One thing I've noticed on my current (general) site is that ads on specific pages sometimes include topics relevant to the other pages. To use the sports example, pages on basketball sometimes also have ads related to baseball, if baseball has more total pages on the site.
I think focused would also do better from an SEO point of view. At least I hope so, as I'm now starting a second more focused site myself!

alika

7:41 pm on Jun 23, 2008 (gmt 0)

My general site -- or the sports that includes sections about basketball, football, baseball and auto racing as given in the example -- does so much better than my tightly focused sites in terms of ECPM and EPC. Our large site covers various topics that our target audience is interested in.

And ad targeting is very good as well -- football pages show football ads, not basketball ads.

Atomic

8:00 pm on Jun 23, 2008 (gmt 0)

You can also have a subject that's tightly focused but cuts across many subjects. For example, you could have a site about sports medicine it might relate to football, basketball etc. You never run out of things to write about and can still be focused.

[edited by: Atomic at 8:01 pm (utc) on June 23, 2008]

Pepito

9:00 pm on Jun 23, 2008 (gmt 0)

Although it could better, money wise, I always will prefer a global site rather than thousand of medium/small sites.

leadegroot

1:25 am on Jun 26, 2008 (gmt 0)

Although Google's habit of showing ads for site A on site B (I think them being on the same Adsense account confuses them) sort of undermines any such stats :(