People everywhere seem to be making thousands of dollars a month, Markus makes millions per year, and… so you must be an utter dolt if you’re sitting there staring at your $105 check for last month.

Maybe not.

Like most web distributions of everything, there’s a power law effect for people going after adsense income. In other words, a few people (and you can bet they post to let us know who they are!) are going to make the lion’s share of the money, some larger number of people are going to make OK money, and a whole lot of us are going to make, well, not really very good money at all.

Of course, the whole lynchpin of the winner-take-all society is the way that our insane belief that we’ll be one of the lucky few helps us keep plugging away for a pittance. The large number of ghetto kids who are certain they’re going to be NBA stars have a lot in common with adsense slave-workers who are convinced they’re going to be the next Markus-like Millionaire.

But let’s run some numbers anyway, even though everyone who thinks the numbers couldn’t apply to them will keep thinking that way. It won’t change anyone’s behavior, but maybe seeing some numbers that actually match your own experience (as opposed to making you ashamed of your own experience) might be a pleasant change.

Scenario

There’s a million ways to skin the adsense cat, but certainly the straight-shooter, white-hat, Build Good Content and Good Advertisers Will Come approach is used by a whole lot of new adsensers. Practically speaking, if you’re just now embarking on a black-hat, get-rich-quick scheme, then you’re so far behind the old-timers (and Google) that the odds against you are even crueller anyway.

So here’s the scenario: you’re going to make your adsense gold by building good content and getting ads, and over time the dollars will just keep mounting up.

Assigning Numbers

Of course, adsense income varies very widely by topic and by what SmartPricing thinks of you this week. But still, I think it’s possible to arrive at some plausible guesses for some average income.

One oft-quoted guesstimate claims that people in the adsense content business make roughly $10/page per year. But I’m going to say a more realistic estimate is $5/page per year. That’s probably better than you’re going to make off a joke-of-the-day type of content, but probably plausible for anyone who does a modest amount of investigation about where likely good income topics lie.

I know, if you’re a newbie you’re thinking “oh, I’m pretty sure I can beat $10/page per year”. I know, you’re special, but remember that this set of numbers is aimed at what’s going to happen to most newbie adsensers, not really smart people like you, to whom the odds do not apply.

Also keep in mind that a number of things conspire against the new adsenser. If you got few pages, it’s harder to get natural inbound links. It’s harder to get PR and harder to rank highly for popular terms. Think of adsense like one of those online games where you have to spend the first part of the game being a toady and doing a grunt work to get enough gold/skills/whatever to actually have any fun (and to avoid being wiped out by the first opponent you look at funny).

So yes, however improbably low you think it, let’s go with $5/page per year.

Next, of course, is how fast can you write pages? As always, there’s a trade-off here. Two sentences per page is going to let you crank a lot out quickly — but lower the odds that they’ll actually do you any good. And, if you just write crap, you greatly lower the odds you’ll get any of those “natural”, one-way, inbound links from authority sites.

Google is not magic, but if you think they have not managed to achieve at least a rough correlation between rankings and actual website quality/usefulness, then why are you investing time in this business anyway?

Also, you ain’t gonna live off the income from your initial 10-page adsense site, so you’ve probably got to spend some time elsewhere making a living. you probably can’t work 10-hour days on nothing but creating content. And, many people have actual families or other frivolous pursuits that keep them from working 7-day weeks. And remember, we’re looking for numbers that describe what’s going to happen to most newbie adsensers who embark on this expedition.

I want to go with a number of 2 hours per page, and 4 hours per day. And I’ll assume you work on this project 5 days per week, and 50 weeks per year.

Multiplication!

Now comes the fun part. you plug away at this adsense thing for a year, and where do you think you (the imaginary “average” adsenser) will be?

Well, after a year, you’ve got 50 weeks * 5 days/week * 2 pages/day = 500 pages. Wow! Let’s hope you picked a topic that you could actually write that much about! (what was the most number of pages you ever wrote for a term paper? Hmmmmmm…)

Now how much yearly income will your website make you at that point? Well, 500 pages * 5 dollars/page/year = $2500/year = $208/month.

Is it Worth It?

Let’s suppose after that year of work, your website will produce as estimated for a while. Of course, you don’t really make that $2500 in year 1, because your page count was slowly growing from zero during the first year. And some people are going to find that their website earnings on a “frozen” site go up, while many will find them going down sooner or later, due to competition or algorithm changes.

But to make the math easy, let’s assume (conservatively I think), that your total earnings (even in the face of Google algorithm changes) from this website will be at least 3 * $2500 = $7500 — even if you do no other work on it after the end of year one. One of the paybacks for doing true-blue, white-hat, decent content development should be that you’re less likely to get “wiped out” completely by a Google algorithm change, though I would not expect the website to earn it’s peak forever with no changes.

So, you made $7500 and all you invested was 50 * 7 * 4 = 1400 hours. That’s right, you made $5.35/hour.

Sorry, you grossed $5.35/hour. you’ll probably need to be paying taxes (and some Social Security in the U.S.) on that. But still, you had the pleasure of being your own boss, eh?

Conclusion

Disagree with my assumptions? Of course you do! But if you’re an adsense newbie, you should at least look at the numbers and then see whether your own estimates are panning out as you go.

After a couple of months of adsense work, do you have more or less than the 80 pages of content I’m assuming the average adsenser will have?

After a couple of months of adsense work, are you making more or less than the $.14/page per day I’ve assumed here?

After a couple of months of adsense work, do you have more or less than the 160 hours of invested time I guesstimated for this model?

Am I anywhere close in my estimation of what will happen to the average adsenser? I don’t know, but I suspect this flimsy model is a lot closer to reality than you’ll get by reading posts by people who are on the sweet end of the power-law curve. People at the much more heavily populated end of the curve (that’s the part that looks an awful lot like a flat line) rarely post their earnings experience.

Sometimes I wonder if those unrealistic expectations don’t lead to more cases of outright fraud, as people decide that must be what “everyone else” is doing, since “everyone else” seems to be striking it rich with adsense.

Am I telling people not to try to make adsense? No. But I’m telling people to not do adsense instead of getting an education, to not quit their job to do adsense, to not forego relationships to work more on adsense. And if you’re here to tell me that you did all those things and you’re now the NBA star equivalent of adsense, well, just remember that one bad injury can take you out of the game forever.

E.g. you can see what AdSense niches make revenue.