Today we are sharing a case study of the site itsthevibe.com that earns over $9 000 000/ month by displaying AdSense ads. This entertainment news site receives over 200 000 000 visitors monthly and its traffic trends are still growing.
In this article, we are sharing how this website grows its traffic exponentially and how it monetizes the traffic.
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Let's dive into this article...
Traffic Analysis
In March 2021, itsthevibe.com had an average of 9 000 000 visitors. 4 months later, the site experienced a 20x exponential traffic growth to over 200 000 000 visitors. The owners of the site do not attribute this growth to any secret search engine hack or tricks. All they did was buy massive amounts of traffic from other sites.
Traffic Sources
According to the data on SimilarWeb, 40% of the traffic received by itsthevibe.com during this period came from display ads. The main traffic sources where they purchased their traffic were Outbrain, Yahoo Ads, Taboola, GDN, and Skimlinks. The main sources were mainly native ads and display banner ads.
SimilarWeb indicates that most of its ads were displayed on mostly very big sites with tons of traffic. Websites like Fox News, AOL, CNN, Huffington Post, New York Post, and more. All these sites receive millions of visitors per month and having your ads placed on them is a sure way to blow up your website’s traffic. The ad spots on these websites are highly competed for and advertisers must be ready to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per month to get their ads shown on such sites, especially with native ads.
The remaining 60% of traffic is organic, 45% direct visits, and 8% email.
Website monetization
This website is mainly monetized by display ads.
The site has very many ad placements from top banners to side banners, bottom banners. It also displays a bunch of native ads below each article.
The shocking thing is that it doesn’t display any single ad on its homepage/ main page but only on the article pages.
The magic part of this site is the slideshows at the bottom of the page. These slide shows display the highlights of the most trending entertainment articles and news which obviously attract the users to read more. This feature makes the visitors keep opening new articles to read more interesting content.
SimilarWeb indicates that the website has an average scroll depth of 9. Having such a strong scroll depth allows this site to make a bigger ROI while monetizing with ads.
In other words, the slideshow feature at the bottom gives the site a huge scroll depth of 9 and it allows the owners to remain profitable even when they buy traffic from other websites.
Revenue
The website’s statistics show that it receives 90% of its traffic from the USA. Knowing that the Adsense CPM for USA traffic ranges from $6 to $8. Considering that the 10% of the GEOs lower the site’s average CPM to $5. this means the website has the potential to generate a minimum of $9 000 000/ month in revenue.
You can get this figure by multiplying:
200 000 000 visitors * 9/1 000 * $5 = $9 000 000
This is not purely profit but the minimum estimated revenue. The amount this website spends on buying traffic is not clearly stated but the numbers are interesting enough due to the high scroll depth which can defend the ROI.
Conclusion
Having a website with high scroll depth in a broad appeal niche like entertainment is helps to get traffic and monetize with a strategy like the one used by itsthevibe.com. The website used an ads arbitration monetization strategy which enables it to earn over $9 000 000 in monthly revenue ad as we have seen, that is the minimum estimation — it could be more.
Webmasters must find creative ways to increase their scroll depth because it assures you of earning more with display ads even though your website has average value content. The main aim is to have visitors scroll further down the page, and hook them up in the process so that they view more ads.
To learn a few tricks on how to increase your website’s scroll depth, you can read this article we covered on the topic.
