WordPress AdSense Earnings Report and Analysis (First 4 Months of Blogging)

It’s now been 4 months since I started my StatisticsPlaybook WordPress blog. In this post, I’ll share and analyze the AdSense earnings I’ve made through the blog since getting approved by AdSense.

I try to be as accurate as possible when writing blog posts, but sometimes there are errors in the information. If you find one, please comment and I’ll correct it. If you make a purchase using a link on this blog, I may earn a small commission.

Monthly AdSense Earnings Disclosure

Here are the monthly earnings and related data from September 2023, when I began actively writing blog posts with AdSense, up to the present.

Duration	Total amount (US$)	Pageviews	Impressions	Clicks
All	140.65	89,875	267,305	503
September 2023	15.70	18,686	31,925	65
October 2023	62.69	38,340	116,005	232
November 2023	33.61	20,109	71,992	114
December 2023 (by the 17th)	28.64	12,740	47,383	92

From September 1, 2023 to December 17, 2023, you have earned a total of $140.

September 2023 – $15 (First Month of AdSense Earnings)

In the first month of using AdSense, I earned $15. That’s an average of about $0.50 per day. For a newly launched blog, I’d say it was a smooth start. There weren’t many posts yet, and the pageviews were the lowest at 18,000.

Looking back, September—the first month of my WordPress blog—was mostly spent finalizing the ad layout. I experimented with different placements and eventually settled on the current structure. Every day the ad layout changed; it was total chaos.

While the pageviews were 18,000 in September, ad impressions were 31,000. Compared to 70,000 impressions for 20,000 pageviews in November, this is quite a small number. That means each visitor saw relatively few ads.

In other words, visitors likely left after viewing just one or maybe two pages.

Since the ad setup wasn’t properly established yet, there weren’t many ads to display. The total number of clicks was 65, so earning $15 means the average revenue per click was around $0.24.

October 2023 – $62 (Second Month of AdSense Earnings)

October 2023, the second month of running my WordPress blog, was the heyday (?) of the Slitong blog. I earned a solid $62—even though there weren’t many posts, the number of visitors spiked.

The reason? Five of my blog posts were featured on Google Discover. (See the image below.)

The total number of visitors in October was 38,000—the highest from September through to the current month of December. Naturally, pageviews increased as well, and the number of ad clicks jumped to 232, more than three times the previous month.

In October, I earned a total of $62, and for the first time, I thought, “Hey, blogging might really be worth it.”
But that dream was brutally shattered the following month.

November 2023 – $33 (Third Month of AdSense Revenue)

November 2023 was the dark age of the Sensible Statistics Life blog.
The root cause of this slump was actually the AdSense ad layout finalized in October.

An ad placed at the very top of the homepage caused a cumulative layout shift issue, which led to a failure in passing Google’s Core Web Vitals—one of the key criteria Google uses to determine whether a blog is high quality. As a result, my blog posts were removed from Google Discover (the recommendation algorithm). Mistakes made in September affected October, and the fallout hit my November revenue hard. This shows how the aftermath of certain issues in blogging can linger and hit more slowly—but longer—than on platforms like YouTube.

Google uses a one-month observation window when evaluating Core Web Vitals. Once a blog is marked as low quality, it must maintain good performance metrics for a full month to be reclassified as “good.” For my blog, Sensible Statistics Life, it was exactly one month later—on November 7—that the URLs were deemed good. Revenue started to increase again from November 19.

What’s fascinating is that during the period when URLs were considered “poor,” I had many visitors but low revenue. But once my URLs were marked as “good,” revenue started to improve even with the same number of visitors. For example, in early November, even with over 1,100 pageviews, I only earned about $0.60. In contrast, in late November, with similar pageviews, earnings felt noticeably higher.

December 2023 – $53 (Fourth Month of AdSense Revenue)

In December, earnings improved significantly compared to November. As of December 17, I had already reached 85% of November’s total revenue. Additionally, the page RPM was the highest among the four months tracked so far.

Final December Update

December turned out to be a much stronger month than November, with a total revenue of $53 and an increased page RPM of $2.17.
What I personally found interesting was that I hadn’t changed any of the ad settings—only added more blog posts—yet the RPM still increased.
In fact, as I write this on January 17, my current revenue has already surpassed the total for December, and RPM has continued to rise.

What is Page RPM?

Page RPM is one of the most important metrics for website owners or bloggers using AdSense. RPM stands for “Revenue per Mille” (mille = thousand), meaning revenue per 1,000 page views. It tells you how much revenue your blog or website generates on average for every 1,000 page views.

So, a blog with a high RPM can earn good revenue even with fewer visitors. Also, a high RPM means your site is well-positioned to generate significant income if one of your posts gets picked up by recommendation algorithms and goes viral.

In Closing

That wraps up my analysis of AdSense earnings from four months of running a WordPress blog in 2023. Here are some of my key takeaways:

• Writing with care is fundamental.
• The impact of today’s decision is not immediately known. (It will take longer to be reflected)
• You need to take your time with the tempo.

I’m also running a separate blog focused on online monetization. I’ll continue sharing my AdSense income updates over on WPlaybook. If you’re curious about WordPress or making money online, feel free to stop by!

Here’s hoping the day I earn $100 a day comes soon. Have a great day! 🙂