Got an email question today that took me a second to figure out. Seems that a new webmaster looking to make money with a website with ads from Google AdSense was wondering how in the world he would ever make any money based on the numbers he was seeing. In the end, he wondered how much money can I make with ads on my website.
At first I thought that maybe he did not have realistic expectations about how much money he could make by being in a program like AdSense and having them post ads on his site. But, as it turns out, there was a tiny terminology issue instead.
M Is 1,000 In Roman Numerals
After some experience as a financial planner, I am used to finding out just what “M” means in any given circumstance. Partly because it can change depending upon the context, and even more commonly, because people have a tendency to misuse ‘m’ regardless of the context.
For example, in some contexts, m = thousand, and M = million. You can be sure that plenty of people don’t know that the capitalization matters.
When it comes to advertising programs or being paid for writing, m only means one thing no matter whether it is capitalized or not.
Write and publish an article to any of the revenue sharing article directories out there and you’ll find that you earn money at a certain rate. That rate may be quoted in PPM.
If you are a webmaster trying to make money running a website with ads, you may find that the various ad programs offer you a certain amount of money per click, and maybe a certain amount of money for a certain number of page views.
The Google AdSense Reports website shows a column labeled eCPM.
If you are thinking “million” for the above M’s then you should be very discouraged. Fortunately, it isn’t million at all.
In Roman Numerals, M is 1000. In all of the above acronyms, that is what the M stands for, 1,000, not 1,000,000. If you are wondering why not T, the answer is that T could stand for tens.
So, when Associated Content offers your $1.50 PPM, they mean Payment Per Thousand page views, not million. That still isn’t big money unless the article is very popular, but it’s still way better than earning a $1.50 per million page views.
Likewise, in Google’s AdSense program, eCPM stands for Effective Cost Per Thousand impressions. For the advertiser, that is a measurement of the cost of their ad campaign. For the web developer, that is an estimate of what a website could theoretically earn for every 1,000 impressions of an ad. Keep in mind that this is above and beyond any payment per click.
Now, I hope everyone feels a little bit better.
By the way, the Google AdSense Crash Course for Writers is nearly complete, so grab the ArcticLlama RSS Feed and be the first to know when it comes out.
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