Our 12 cents worth

Since adding Google Adsense on March 2, 2008, The Freakwenter's revenue has totaled $15.99, the result of 34 clicks. The Freakwenter has good reason to believe that this activity did not, on average, reflect substantial interest by the readers in the products advertised in the ads. But from the perspective of clicks per reader-hour, is the Freakwenter readership really that far out of line?

As mentioned in the last post, there are an estimated 1.3 billion internet users in the world. Suppose that these users, on average, spend about one hour per day browsing pages with Google ads. That's 1.3 billion hours per day. March 2 was about 40 days ago. In this time, perhaps 40*1.3 billion = about 52 billion hours worth of reader time occurred worldwide. Now 40 days is about 11% of a year, and last year Google revenue was about $16.5 billion, so in those 40 days, Google may have earned about $1.8 billion. A look at Google's financial statements suggests that about 30% of these funds get paid to the owners of pages displaying the ads. That makes $0.54 billion paid to page owners for every 52 billion hours of reader time, or about a penny an hour. According to The Freakwenter's sitemeter, there are an average of 7 visitors per day, each staying on the page for an average of 2 min and 37 seconds. That's about 17.5 minutes of reading per day. In 40 days, that's about 12 hours of reading. Going by the global average, The Freakwenter should have earned about 12 cents by now, enough to give the writers all of about 0.1 cents per hour of labor.

Jeesh guys, stop clicking, or we'll get disqualified.