Virtual Pets Blog

December has had multiple reports on various webmaster communities on being a bad month (income wise) for various publishers. Randy brown also posted the following on his blog:

One of the problems is that Adsense earnings are low this month. Seeing what has always been my largest source of income drop is a bit unnerving - what would you think if your biggest earner was at an all time (or near-all time) low?

Why is December such a bad month for everyone? Is it because all of the advertisers are trying to push their affiliate-based shops - and niche sites aren’t going to make nearly as much this year - or is it a sign of things to come - and the end of big buck earners on adsense?

We’re as clueless as you are, but if you have any reports for this month - then please let us know how your income is doing this month. Is it higher? What type of a site are your running? A content-rich site or a shopped-based sites? We need answers here guys, and the more answers we receive - the better chance we’ll have at coming to a solution of this problem.

Does anyone else suffer from this? It seems like the more we drive traffic to our sites, the less money adsense earns - is it a case of being smartpriced? No, we believe, our current niches - which are myspace sites and a virtual pets community are two competitive niches, well, myspace sites are, and a lot of myspace webmasters are suffering from our very competitive market. Not only has the eCPM on a lot of myspace sites gone down over the past couple months - it seems like they’re a lot less advertisers advertising on myspace sites, and if us, myspace webmasters, hope to make more money from our myspace-niche sites, then we need to try to uproar a change in our niche.

But, how? Well, we believe in innovation - and if this myspace niche is to change, we need more dedicated webmasters, who are willing to put in the work - and mass promote their myspace site. We not only use Adsense on our niche sites, but we also use Kontera so we have two sources of income - so if one income source goes down, then we have a backup plan. We believe, the more myspace webmasters that learn how to SEO their sites - and promote it to the masses, the more advertisers our niche can see.

What about the virtual pets niche? Well, our virtual pets community has been around since April 16, 2007 (after a mass database crash, thanks Liquidweb!) - and we believe the niche is small because not a whole lot of webmasters know about virtual pets - and well, if our niche is to grow, then more people need to learn about virtual pets, so if you don’t know about virtual pets, then you should read our What are virtual pets article.

Since, we have marketshare in two niches - we hope to give our network an edge in online advertising - by increasing the potential of our sites, by bringing in more webmasters into each niche. If we can do it, then you can to. So, what are you waiting for? Tell your friends to join up - and bring change to the myspace niche and the virtual pets niche - because remember, the more competition, the more earners we’ll make - if users can bring in quality traffic, and bring in people that know what they’re doing working in the myspace sites niche - or the virtual pets niche.

Looks like Admin fusion couldn’t handle the fierce competition with The admin zone because they’re now selling out at Sitepoint.

Their buy it now is set at $27,500.. Do you guys think AdminFusion will sell for their buy out price - or will they settle for less like $8,000 or so? Lee Dodd and Ryan couldn’t make AF as popular as they thought they could - and the reason why they’re selling Admin Fusion was posted on their sales thread:

This forum is co-owned and my parter is busy with life and school. We both feel it is time to move on. I don’t see why he wouldn’t as long as he has time available. Yes, we will happily sign a non-compete. Yes, it was posted up to the staff first and posted up to the community today. My company, Escalate Media, owns many forums. None of them compete with AF though.

Such a shame really, we wonder who will buy out AdminFusion - and if they’ve owned forums in the past and how popular they are.

So, do you think AdminFusion will go to a good or a bad owner?