Justin Germino Ramblings

I had been using AdSense to earn money from my blog for pretty much 10+ years overall and didn’t really put much effort into looking at other ad platforms I was content and pretty much figure that Google the giant that it is must be better at automating ad placement and revenue generation than most other companies.

Turns out I was very wrong and leaving money on the table, how much? If I had used Ezoic the last few years I would have more than $10,000 extra dollars in my pocket from passive ads, that is literally not an exaggeration of how much money I left on the table by just sticking with Google AdSense for my blog and not testing Ezoic sooner.

Ezoic claims to do an average of 2-3x as much revenue as native AdSense and so far nearly 2 months in they are able to back that up with earnings deposits and analytics to prove it isn’t just hype. Now here is what I have learned, if you run an informational, news or general blog then you are in an ideal position to maximize your earnings with Ezoic, in networking with blogging peers it seems that if you run a very tight niche site, it may not be as beneficial especially if you are in a very tight focused niche but it still may be worth testing.

How does Ezoic Work

Ezoic is a bit more intrusive to setup than just simply enabling some Javascript on your site for Google to insert ads, it actually requires you repoint your site DNS over to Ezoic themselves and use them as a CDN (Don’t worry they use Cloudflare so the same protections you get from Cloudflare extend with Ezoic). They will support all your custom DNS records if you have them and you have to point your NameServers over to Ezoic and do all appropriate routing which is not hard to do if you purchased your domain name from NameCheap or Route53, you just update the configuration to point to Ezoic NameServers.

You can turn on Ezoic for Desktop Browsers, Mobile and Tablets independently

And you get to control the initial placement and optimization of where ads display down to the individual page if you prefer with their Chrome extension.

Ezoic works by taking advantage of placement and learning patterns creating heatmaps and knowing which ads placed where generate the most engagement. This learning pattern means that the Ezoic platform takes a week or two to get off the ground running as it builds a profile and learns those patterns.

So using historical analytics, I can show you that in July 2020 my site which was averaging about 37k PageViews the past several months was only making around $40 – $100 in AdSense per 37k – 45k pageviews. The days fluctuated anywhere from .32 to $3 in earnings on a single day.

AdSense Earnings July 2020

In August I had about 42k pageviews and earnings went up a little bit to around $68 in ADSense earnings for the month.

AdSense Earnings August 2020

September turned out to be a little better even, as we had some anomaly days of $8 – $13 earnings on a single day.

AdSense Earnings September 2020

But on October 19^th 2020 I decided it was time to take the risk and cut my site over to Ezoic and see if it really could live up to the claim that it would out earn AdSense by 2-2.5x my current AdSense revenue. Note I was bouncing between $40 and $100 for about a year so I had a good amount of solid analytics to compare Ezoic to.

I activate Ezoic on October 19^th 2020 and within the first 12 days, it already made more than the entire month of July 2020 which was a good sign.

Ezoic Earnings the first 12 days.

You can see that the first week or so was the learning period and then it started to ramp up. At no point did any day go into the .50 or lower like there was with many AdSense days.

It continued to RAMP up and kept climbing each week in November 2020, by the time I had November 1^st through November 30^th you could see that 54,913 pageviews which is only 17% more pageviews than in September 2020 ended up with $395.06 ad earnings and an ePMV of $9.78. This is over 300% increase in revenue with only a 17% increase in pageviews.

Ezoic Earnings November 2020

Ezoic first full month after the learning showed a 300% increase in revenue compared to using vanilla AdSense auto-ads.

Realizing there is some overlap here as the month of December isn’t finished, I can report that with Ezoic my site for the first time hit over $400 in AdSense in a 30 day span with less than 55k PageViews. That is the remarkable part, we are talking about a $10.72 ePMV in 12 years of running AdSense, when my site was getting 200k Pageviews per month back in 2012 I was only averaging about $300 in AdSense.

Ezoic Earnings Last 30 Days (11/21 – 12/12)

This is also with me using the “balanced” ad plan, and having to disable some ads on my SpintoWin page where the ads were interfering with the Spin Game, which is my highest trafficked page getting almost 10k views by itself per month. That is why there was a dip in the last 12 days of December, as we determined the Ezoic banner was slicing in some of my game and breaking code, so I had to remove 1 banner segment and it caused a slight drop off, but even with this drop the average earnings are 3-4x better than my earnings were on AdSense auto-ads.

You could select Revenue focused and let the program up the ads to try to maximize revenue, but I did not want to test this yet as a risk to my end user experience visiting my site. You can also minimize the ads with User Experience Focused if you find that the ads are too intrusive, which I found them to be no more intrusive than the Google AdSense auto-ads at balanced honestly.

Ezoic What About Site Performance?

Because Ezoic uses Cloudflare and CDN it generally shouldn’t cause any negative site performance compared to your existing site as the content is cached. There could be some slight extra latency as the DNS has to redirect to possibly another site before coming back to your site on new requests, but this generally could be minimized by leveraging proper caching plugins like W3 Total Cache and optimizing your site. Even more you could leverage the Site Speed Accelerator function from Ezoic but this wasn’t tested for this review and will come later.

Ezoic Security and Privacy

Ezoic requires to run over an SSL certificate as most sites do now, and even has integrations for showing a privacy policy as well as hosting a consent management option for you for opting in if you aren’t using a WordPress plugin or other method to have people opt in to cookies and ads for GDPR and CCPA compliance as well.

Ezoic AD Location Design and Testing

With layout testing, split testing, AMP testing and so much more at your fingertips you really have so much more power and control over how you want your ad placements to look, render and split test away to optimize what fits best for you and your site.

Again the Ezoic Ad Test Extension for Chrome is a MUST and recommended plugin to let you not only test, configure but choose if you want to disable ad blocks on specific pages and posts for your site.

So far, I am only about 60 days into using Ezoic which completely replaced my Google AdSense auto-ads on my blog and I am very impressed with the conversions so far. Had I done this back in 2018, I might have earned as much as an extra $10,000 in ad revenue from my 1 blog.

Sign up for Ezoic and test it with your site today, but one thing to note is that your site must generate 10,000 or more pageviews per month to be eligible to sign up for Ezoic. So that is the only caveat to determine if you are eligible to sign up and should investigate if you can make more money than AdSense on your site by switching to Ezoic or not.

I can tell you that if I had more blogs with 10k impressions per month or news sites, unless they were specific niche affiliate sites targeting product sales, Ezoic so far appears to be an excellent option for news and review sites where you generally publish information and are not specifically targeting niche affiliate product sales.

This article was originally published on Dragon Blogger Technology and Entertainment.

If you are already an Amazon Prime member you may not be aware that you already now have access to Twitch Prime since Twitch is owned by Amazon.  Twitch Prime offers an array of other benefits for Amazon Prime members who happen to be gamers or simply want to support their favorite gamers on Twitch without coming out of pocket to subscribe to them.  With Twitch Prime you get access to free games, unlocks and skins for various games and more.  With your Twitch Prime linked to your Amazon prime you can now also give 1 free monthly sub to another Twitch Streamer which is basically like donating $4.99 to a Twitch streamer of your choice without paying anything, you are just using your free Twitch Prime sub that comes with Amazon Prime.

How to take advantage of Twitch Prime

You have to have as Twitch account at least created, even if you never plan on streaming yourself.  So the first thing you do is create an account on Twitch.

Then to get started, log into Twitch Prime if you are already signed into Amazon at this URL: https://twitch.amazon.com

You will see a button to Activate Prime Gaming near the top right side of the screen.
Then you will be asked to confirm your country and be taken to the screen which authorizes your Twitch account or asks you to sign in if you are not yet signed into Twitch.

After you authorized it you should get a confirmation from Amazon that you have leveled up with information on what you can now do with your Twitch Prime.

Now if you want to claim your free games and game content you can click on See Loot, if you want to use your Twitch Prime sub now to support your favorite streamers one month a time, you can click on the Subscribe Free button and just find your favorite streamers channel.  Example if you go to https://www.twitch.tv/dragonbloggers and click on the subscribe button at the top you will now see a way to use your Twitch Prime sub for free as an alternative to the $4.99 subscription.

You also get the Twitch Prime crown badge next to your profile on Twitch.  One reason why you should use your Twitch Prime sub for a streamer is that a streamer gets to keep 100% of the Twitch Prime sub revenue, the full $4.99 instead of only 50% if you pay for a subscription. This means to the streamer the Twitch Prime sub actually provides them more value as a sub when it comes to revenue.  This is why Twitch Prime subs are highly regarded and truly appreciated if you have one to spare and use to support your favorite streamers.

So if you have a Twitch Prime sub, feel free to drop it on dragonbloggers and you will get a free random PC Steam game key as a thank you for lending us your Twitch Prime Sub.  In addition many of our giveaways offer a bonus +100 entries to Twitch Subscribers of our channel which can give you an odds boost of winning one of our giveaways.

So there are a number of different ways bloggers try to monetize their thoughts and passion for putting words into a blog post and some are passive income earning programs like banners, ads while others may be hosting affiliate links tied to certain keywords or product links to help spur some affiliate sales for those curious and clicking on the link to publish something.

Another method of potentially monetizing your blog is allowing guest or sponsored content into your blog knowing that you are accepting guest content in exchange for payment. This does require you have a site-wide disclosure to be legit and compliant with FTC as well as you may have other rules to follow to be compliant with Google ToS but is a method that should be considered if you have a blog that has aged but isn’t getting a lot of views, as many guest post programs will not have as much of a requirement on number of pageviews as other factors.

Some of the best programs currently available are

---

Flyout

Flyout is a platform that you can list your blog on and set your price, you will be assigned content to review and publish on your blog in exchange for your set price that you list.  I have seen some decent quality articles and content match is hit and miss even when you put specific categories as the only type you accept.  You have an option to review and manually post all content or allow content to auto-post, if you run a blog in some content topics you could end up making pretty decent earnings in sponsored posts leveraging flyout and with the auto-publishing feature it automates the process if you are less picky about reviewing content before it publishes.  As with most systems, it does require the links in your post to be dofollow by default and doesn’t support nofollow links for the content so this is always a risk in my opinion, but if you want to monetize your blog with sponsored content you will need to accept that many want the SEO value of having their link counted and recognized by Google indexing.

---

---

SeedingUp / Teliad

SeedingUp  used to be known as Teliad and is a program where you can sign up as a publisher and sell links on your site or sell entire blog post reviews. The site will let you list your homepage or each individual page you want to put into the system to sell links on. Teliad will calculate the annual value of your page that you list and will allow you to choose the low/medium or high end of that price. Once your price is set you can request Teliad to adjust it by contacting their support directly if you feel it is not accurate. You are paid out in monthly installments for sponsored reviews, and even if you sell 1 blog post for $120, you are paid in 12 $10 installments every month as they do this to ensure an advertisers post stays up for at least 12 months. Other than that the program still has potential to make bloggers money. Just remember that you have to list every page in your site separately that you want to potentially sell links on, this is a manual process and involves using your sitemap to get all site URL’s however.  You can also offer Infographic spots and other text link opportunities, you can choose to only accept NoFollow sponsored opps for those who wish to remain fully Google ToS compliant.

SeedingUp will generally net you more offers for blogs with a higher PageRank like several other services.

---

LinkWorth

LinkWorth is a service that offers bloggers the ability to sell reviews, links, ads, banners, muras or other types of advertiser requests. So far I have done a few LinkPost and LinkAds and the payouts are pretty good if you have a blog with a decent Google Pagerank. They have a recurring billing and payment system so an advertiser can purchase a LinkAd and keep renewing it monthly while the publisher’s account balance keeps earning and collecting. LinkWorth pays out when balance reaches $25 and I earned enough in the few months I was with them to recommend them. I personally know a few bloggers who make hundreds per month with LinkWorth too, but here your blog needs to be a PR5 or higher to really earn more.

---

ReviewMe (Suspended)

ReviewMe was a popular service that connects advertisers with bloggers. It isn’t easy to get your blog approved in the system sometimes (you have to contact support if your blog is first rejected). This site also has you list your blog and set some categories, they set a default price if someone hires you directly, but you can manually adjust this. Advertisers will then come to you with offers and you will get better offers depending on your PageRank, Alexa Rank and estimated RSS subscribers. Again here, PageRank seems to be the winner in the # of opps you get. I personally know a few bloggers who make over $200 per month with ReviewMe, but since I only have a PageRank 2 blog approved in the system, I get about $40 in offers, but only usually do $20 per month at this time. ReviewMe is highly valuable if you have a blog with a good PageRank though and don’t count the service out.

The Good Guys

You are the unknown

buried in anonymity

actions untold

quiet but bold

You are the many

immeasurable kindnesses

deeds done each day

with nothing to say

You are The Good Guys

working to tilt

a world in peril

one action at a time

Lately I have been experimenting with a lot of Twitch streaming and particularly using Streamlabs OBS and twitch with leveraging multiple scenes, overlays, sources and more. I created a few video tutorial showcasing some of what I setup and do in the hopes it helps others as a lot of people still come to me with advice on how to fix framerate drops and ask me for my SLOBS settings.

This was my video for setting up scenes and sources including touching on themes and widgets like choosing an Alert box.

This video directly covers some of the items to check when you have stream latency, lag, framerate drops or other Streamlabs OBS streaming issues to Twitch and hopefully you get some relief with implementing some of these tips.

Any questions about SLOBS let me know and I will do my best to find the answer, currently I can’t seem to get separate alert boxes to work with different scenes even when the alert box is set to a browser source instead of alert box.

It has been a while since I updated my personal blog, so I thought I would end the year with some updates on some of my smaller projects. Mostly I found the new WordPress 5.x to be troublesome with the Avada theme and more specifically the Fusion Builder plugin that comes with and is required by the Avada WordPress theme.

This has caused me to switch to finding a different theme on my smaller sites so I can exclusively use the new editor and get my sites more lean and easier to manage. I decided after reading in a blogging Facebook group to try the Frontier free WordPress theme which has an excellent set of customization options that are very easy to use even if the theme is a little generic. The theme wound up working well for some of my smaller sites in keeping them very lean and fast loading.

I continue to tweak things here and there in various programs, I am currently going to be ending my contract with BBTV which is a YouTube Partner program and go without any partnership in February 2019 to see if my earnings will be affected. BBTV aka. Viso was taking 20% of my YouTube AdSense earnings which ended up costing more than $600 in 2018 for what I don’t feel was that much worth of benefit.

TubeBuddy is a fantastic plugin and service to hook up to your YouTube Channel and was more valuable than any of the tools that BBTV Viso was providing with a lot of overlap.

Meanwhile, my blogging goals continue to be diversify into more niche sites to try and capitalize on the lower traffic but higher conversion niches where I can, but I find that I have less time and motivation to blog this year compared to previous years after doing it for 10 years now, and I want to spend my free time usually gaming rather than writing lately.

Hopefully I will get inspired again to continue blogging more in 2019.

Happy New Years Everyone.

So recently to save time and not always have to go into the yard to grill something I decided to pick up the Range Mate Pro Deluxe Microwave Grill which supposedly lets you actually grill foods in the microwave.  It was far too hot in the summer to turn on the oven as I don’t have an air conditioner here in Southern California so we also wanted something that will keep the pizza crust crispy when cooking microwave pizza or reheating takeout pizza.

What you get is a 5 in one cooking product that compliments and expands what you can cook in your microwave, this is really great for single people who want to cook more natural foods rather than frozen meals and yet still have the same simplicity without dealing with pans and a charcoal or gass grill.  The 5 in one set really only contains 4 pieces including the grill pan, a steamer tray, a baking tray and the lid.  The cooking instruction book which has 35 different meal instructions on what you can and how to cook the products in the Range Mate Pro grill is a helpful template on how to get started.  You will notice there is also a lot of blank and template lines for you to enter your own foods and timings, because this product does have a lot of “try it” and see how long it takes.

One thing to note is that some items you cook you have to preheat the Range Mate Pro grill before you place the items on the grill and actually cook them, this is to heat up the grill itself so that it cooks from surface temperature not just the microwave food and is necessary to create grill marks in foods and cook the surface.

Most items you preheat the grill for 2 minutes at full power with the lid on, then take the lid off and put your food in the grill and microwave.  It is best to microwave at 50 percent power for everything unless it says otherwise and then keep adding time as needed.  Cooking some left over pizza for example took some extra time, and a normal full frozen 3 minute individual pizza took 7 minutes with the Range Mate Grill but it had a perfect crispy crust instead of a soft chewy crust had I just tossed it on the plate and microwaved it without the grill.  

You can steam vegetables by using one of the inserts, putting water below and then having the steam completely cook the vegetables like broccoli (my favorite), spinach, mushrooms, or simply you can grill portobello mushrooms as well.  Some foods you can just cook one sided, others you have to flip and may want to grill the other side as well, like when I cooked a bison steak in this thing.  Overall I did find it was a bit harder to get internal temperature accurate and right, having rare or medium rare was difficult to assess and it was easy to cook it too little or overcook it to nearly well done by adding just 2 more minutes.  But once the experimentation was done, repeating written down notes for the same thickness level of steak yielded the same results so really it is just trial and error until you find the right timing and settings and then just remembering for next time.

Product was a little pricey but if you don’t have to buy a grill and replacement charcoal or gas, you probably would save money over the longer term if you used this Rangemate 5 in 1 Microwave Grill instead.  It can do nice chicken and cheese quesadilla’s as you can get the tortilla to be grilled as if it were pan fried as well.  

So I had one of those cheap 4 drawer dressers that you get from Amazon, Kohls, Walmart or Target fall apart, this is your typical white or black particle board based dresser that you typically use in a kids or guest room.  I wanted to replace it with something a little more functional, lighter and more specifically fit within a tight space.  I searched on Amazon and took a chance on the YUTING 4-Drawer Plastic Storage Organizer and was impressed enough I thought it worth a review to share my thoughts.

First, this is a fully plastic 6 drawer dresser system (4 drawers are 23″ wide and 2 are half size at top shelf).  The two half drawers at the top can be locked with a key, but as the entire system is plastic this is only a minor deterrent for maybe little kids if you wanted to hide stuff in the top drawers, maybe to lock away some toys during a timeout or something I don’t have any reason to ever use the locks on the top.  They work fine, it is just with a plastic dresser it isn’t sturdy enough to be a true protection type of locked drawer.

Assembly was easy and no tools are required at all, everything snaps together and quite securely in fact.  One thing to remember is to make sure the cosmetic back plates are properly attached while you assemble, I accidentally forgot to put the back on and it was very difficult to try and get this thing separated once it is put together.  It is very secure for plastic, far more than those cheap plastic dressers you find at Home Depot or Lowes that use tubes for the corners.  This thing is nearly as sturdy as a wooden dresser, and the top with the double drawer is sturdy enough to support 50 pounds of weight.  Plus the thing has rollers so you can make it portable or not install the wheels to leave it fixed.

So for a kids room, this makes a great dresser because the containers are actually one whole piece except for the front with handle, this means they can’t stuff too many clothes into a drawer and break it.  Which is what happened with particle board dressers that got overstuffed until the staples/boards started separating and crumbling apart.  Overall I have not used it for very long yet, so will update the post and review with durability tests when I learn more, but I am very satisfied with this product so far and even have very heavy printer on the top of it as seen in the picture.

The company offers 5 different options for the drawer style with the cheapest being $99.99 and some suiting younger kids vs being more generic.  For about the same price as a cheap particle board dresser I found the plastic quality to be good, durable and this to be a much lighter and easier option.  I was able to hold all of the clothes for my 14 year old and 11 year old without issue in the 6 total drawers.