I own a very popular Funny Jokes site and in the past made money from it using AdSense. Unfortunately Google AdSense doesn’t like the racist jokes on the site and have blocked the domain from showing AdSense ads!
It’s a very sad fact that some of the most popular jokes SERPs are racist jokes SERPS like Black Jokes, White Jokes, etc… Before adding racist jokes as an SEO test (site had been running for years and never crossed my mind to add them) it was seeing around 3,000 visitors a day. After adding racist jokes it doubled the traffic to over 7,000 visitors a day and currently it’s regularly breaking 10,000 visitors a day!!!
The most popular page on the site is Black Jokes One Liners and is ranked number 2 in Google for the Black Jokes SERP. In May 2010 the site received 205,579 unique visitors (283,054 visits) .
Note: I lost 2-3 days worth of log data when the dedicated server ground to a halt when my 2010 Election site had over 100,000 visitors in one day (UK general election day) so had to upgrade to a better server and use a backup, so the above is around 20,000 visitors short of what it should have been.
From those visitors 49,522 came from search engines with the search Black Jokes! Second most popular SERP is White Jokes with 16,711 searches from search engines, followed by 15,170 visitors for Mexican Jokes. There’s plenty of non racist SERPs from the 44,391 different keyphrases used in May, but the bulk of the traffic is racist jokes SERPs.
As you can see it’s a very popular jokes website, but it’s not suitable for AdSense, even when AdSense was on the site it showed quite a lot of public service ads!
I tried Clicksor on this jokes site and enabled pop ups which almost competed with previous AdSense revenue for this site (was really spammy compared to AdSense and it was pop ups that made about 70% of the revenue), but I would see Trojan and malicious code warnings from Avast when the pop ups loaded and Google penalised the site** for this: in March 2010 traffic dropped to around 2,000 visitors a day, removed Clicksor from the site about a week later and a week or so after removing Clicksor the traffic not only recovered, but increased from the previous ~7,000 visitors a day to the current ~9,500 visitors a day. So can’t use Clicksor pop ups on this site (any site) because of the malicious code they are allowing their advertisers to show on their pop up ads and the AdSense like ads you get with Clicksor perform poorly!
** I could see from my logs that the site had been visited a lot of times from Google IPs which strongly suggests the site had had a manual Google review. Interestingly it wasn’t over one day, but weeks, presumably checking if the problems had been fixed and when they found the pop ups had been removed (which removed the malicious code that was loading) the site was reinstated in Google.
I also tried Bidvertiser and they are a bloody rip off! 105,276 impressions with Bidvertiser ads in a high CTR area of the page and I made a massive $3.26 from 16 clicks with a 0.02% CTR!!!!!!! I can not believe from over 100,000 impressions (which would have been around 100,000 visitors) only 16 clicked an ad, when with AdSense and Clicksor the CTR was over 2% with very poor ad to content matching (Clicksor in particular had awful ads, gambling etc…).
Despite being able to generate a lot of traffic to websites and make a fair amount of money from the traffic, I’m the first to admit I’m rubbish at FULLY monetising my traffic. Currently I’m not making a penny from the ~10,000 visitor a day to this joke site despite it being my highest traffic site currently.
So how the hell do I make money from this jokes website?
Any white supremacists out their looking for some ad space maybe 
David Law : apparent newbie to making money online
Website - SEO Consultant
13 responses to Making Money Online with a Funny Jokes Site?
Dave,
This brings up a good point. How to make money online besides Adsense.
Many guys out there sell physical good. That means a book or e-book. However, people tell me this is more about RSS feed subscribers. People who are subscribers come back and would buy something if you wrote and sold it.
I think you are a highly ethical guy – so I do not think you want to sell a joke book like that, but maybe you sell something that people who are interested in those joke might also buy. Like survivalist type books.
Or simply use that site to direct traffic to another.
I wish I had the answers.
It is a good question.
I know you tried alternatives to Adsense and you were not impressed. What about a theme that is geared just to increasing subscribers, like huge RSS button, ‘subscribe by e-mail’ – something that says “Did you like this article? please subscribe at the bottom of every post in an artistic way. viperchill.com
Or charge a gold membership if you have seen some forums do. But that takes a loyal base.
Either way it is a great question, how to make money beyond traditional methods – and what is ethical.
Making Money Online with a Funny Jokes Site?
Have added large RSS feed, RSS email subscription, link to my Twitter page and a link to my Facebook page on the right menu at the top with relatively big images. Using a plugin from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/subscription-options/ though wouldn’t be hard to do this manually.
Not happy it has to be 4 image links that pass PR/link benefit to those 4 pages (main reason not done this before), but will see if I can put something together to either turn these into form links or hide them in an iframe or something so they don’t waste link benefit.
Signed up my first Feedburner feed for this site (should have done this sort of thing years ago really).
So will see how it goes.
Took a look at viperchill.com and assuming the young man who owns the site is truthful (no reason to believe he isn’t) those are very impressive stats for his non search engine traffic. I rely completely on search engine traffic (most Google) and it is worrying that I could loose 90% of my traffic overnight if Google decided to ban all my sites in one go! So it would be nice to spread the risk by gaining traffic from other sources.
On his WordPress SEO article he got his nofollow info wrong mind you (advising his readers to use nofollow) so he might want to brush up on his SEO a bit: can’t complain inspired another article for this site
Thanks for the idea to use big RSS image links Mark.
David
Making Money Online with a Funny Jokes Site?
I exchanged some e-mails with the viperchill guy. His stats are real and for a young guy I am impressed. He has a number of sites he does not talk about directly.
Basically on sites that are not for ads he promotes RSS then writes an e-book himself(my understanding )as opposed to affiliates.
Basically once you get people following you, they are a fan. Fans buy from site authors as they want to participate in the success.
Basically you want people to get warm fuzzies. Then they want to buy from you, not from a third party.
This is what he does (reading between the lines)
He had a 150 usd an hour coaching page up for a few days but took it down as he got too many people.
That is a fan base.
I do not have the answers but I think continue to try this with a couple sites and develop SEM ideas.
If you notice the secret to his big success came from guest posting (SEM’s most effective technique today). He did like 40 big guest posts and each time his fan base went up, got links and branding.
I have never done a guest post because if I write content then I want it on my site (mostly).
But I think this is a mindset and where a young guy like that can make me see things differently.
I noticed the no-follow etc – I think he is not an SEO guy but more just a marketing prodigy. I believe in SEO. SEO has brought be very good returns. But maybe trying some SEM, like guest posting would accelerate things. Its my next steps. I would be curious about yours or other people’s takes on guest posting.
Making Money Online with a Funny Jokes Site?
One more thing, if you use those subscribe buttons I think having a header like like “subscribe I do not bite” – or “it is free” or something to get people to think for a second, as people who are experienced web surfers have some ad and button blindness. They just glaze over these, unless you can do something special. This is one take away from viperchill’s site.
I will try this some of my sites.
Making Money Online with a Funny Jokes Site?
Hi,
Why dont you try some CPA zip submit in the site.Since this is an entertainment site you can easily find entertainment related CPA Zip Submits and give it a try.You can sign up for Neverblueads and give it a try..
It is a shame that google banned you from using adsense but they are a very touchy company and are usually sued left right and centre for anything they do wrong so you can’t really blame them. Very impressed with the amount of hits you are getting though.
Money can come from any place, just crowd the crowd
I can sympathise with trying to make money from your joke website.
Thread: ” 100,180 hits today and not enough cash to pay for the electric used by my mouse”
Quite some time ago I raised the above question on a bulletin board and got some ideas from some experienced and knowledgeable posters:
http://www.abestweb.com/forums/showthread.php?t=116590
I took a look at your jokes forum post (you have to register on the forum to read it BTW).
The responses don’t give any solutions per se, but does sum up the problem, humor/joke sites suck for making money! You don’t go to a joke site to buy a product or find a solution to a problem etc… you visit to have a laugh or kill time while bored at work. On my jokes site most of the visitors are looking for racist jokes and those who comment (3,000+ comments on one jokes page for example) are mostly trashing one another!!!
When I had AdSense on the joke site (before the AdSense ban) it averaged around £1 (~$1.50) eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions). In comparison my sites about making money have eCPMs of over £6 and my SEO sites around £5. I have another site about classic literature that received around 2,000,000 impressions last year and it’s eCPM is even lower that the jokes site, so it could be worse
I’m thinking about adding links to affiliates that sell prank products, but I’m not expecting many sales despite regularly breaking 10,000 unique visitors a day, so no rush.
David
Making Money Online with a Funny Jokes Site?
That’s some serious traffic you have David and I’m not sure if you’ve considered any of the following.
1. With such a massive audience I’d pay to have a simple iPhones App created that has the Top 100 jokes. You could do this for several categories. And charge $1 per download or 50c. Might be cheap enough to encourage $20-$30/day or more ;o)
2. Or another option is to encourage people to have a tee-shirt printed with a funny joke. You could get the top 5 jokes from each category and use a service like cafepress.com or fibres.com to let people buy the T-shirt.
3. Another option is to put together a Free PDF with the top 100 Jokes. And within the PDF have a few affiliate links to some of the online Joke Shops.
Some food for thought.
Making Money Online with a Funny Jokes Site?
I hear ya… I have the same issue. I have a similar(kinda) maybe a bit more offensive site that gets almost 1 million page views monthly. Been very hard to make money on. Clicksor did not work due to viruses and malware and everything else had horrid ctr. The only thing that seems to work is sex and dating (generates a few hundred on a small ad).
Guess people looking for tasteless stuff are alone… go figure. I kinda gave up on ever making great money off it. My more mainstream sites make thousands monthly off a fraction of the traffic.
The other thing that would work is the schemes and scams, penny auctions, work at home, etc. I will not use those because I like to sleep at night, but others have no issue and it does work with that type of traffic. Also try lead gen. Add a email squeeze as a flash ad or HTML of some kind. Those actually do well when you offer up something they want in the end and you can sell the leads, have them go to a affiliate program or use them yourself to promote other sites.
What I know for a fact is that products do not work well. That type of traffic does not want to spend any money so look for “free” offers, surveys, what not. CJ, Clickbank, etc. have tons.
I left you my CORRECT email, if you ever wanna trade ideas or links… let me know
my 2 cents
Erica
Making Money Online with a Funny Jokes Site?
My funny jokes site is now breaking 15,000 unique visitors a day, so time I did something to make some money from the site (10K visitors a day wasn’t enough to get me moving apparently
).
Interestingly the top traffic SERP is now Funny Jokes, not bad for number 5 in Google for that SERP (that’s a lot of traffic for that SERP to do well at number 5).
I’ve found a pranks product affiliate that offers a reasonable % and a datafeed, plan to use the datafeed to create my own ad system that runs as a replacement to the ad system I’ve added to my Talian 05 theme (replace AdSense/Clickbank).
Basically will generate ads with X number of products on the sidebar and a single product on the main content ad unit, will have a small thumbnail of each product and excerpt type description (maybe just the title of the product + price) all linking to the affiliate sales page.
Was going to use a random quotes script as a starting point, but all the ones I’ve downloaded (half a dozen) aren’t working in PHP 5! Come to think of it, why didn’t I just search for a PHP script that serves ads
I was also looking for a quotes script to add an automated joke a day section to the site, looks like I got caught up on one solution for both problems!
David
Making Money Online with a Funny Jokes Site?
An Affiliate Random Ad Rotating WordPress Plugin is now running on my funny jokes site at http://www.free-funny-jokes.com/
It was surprisingly difficult to find a WordPress plugin that could be used to rotate ads via a MYSQL database (didn’t want to use text files). I tried over a dozen scripts (not all WordPress plugins) and none of them came close to what I wanted!!!
Eventually found a WordPress plugin called “Nice Quotes Rotator” which was created to add rotating quotes to WordPress blogs, it was apparently inspired by the Hello Dolly plugin that comes with WordPress by default.
Since I was looking to create an affiliate random ad rotating plugin for the jokes site it needed a fair amount of code changes.
After editing the plugin to work as I wanted, downloaded a CSV format Shareasale datafeed that was for an affiliate that offers stupid prank gifts.
Downloaded and partially renamed the images (for SEO reasons) associated with the datafeed, using MS Excel took the name of each product and added Stupid Prank Gifts to the end of it (for SEO and marketing reasons).
Used some nifty javascript/CSS coding so the affiliate links won’t be recognised by Google etc… as links (mo wasted PR/link benefit), but Google can still get to the name of the product and the image that’s uploaded onto my server so potential to gain some prank related SERPs.
Edited my Talian 05 theme (that was pretty easy to do) to use a WordPress shortcode for the new plugin to generate several ads: what you see when you visit the jokes site.
Pretty cool result if I do say so myself
Will be interesting to see how much money it makes, before today had Chitika ads running on the site and their performance was RUBBISH: last 30 days just $76.69 from 1,087,247 impressions (I think Chitika reports an impression each ad loaded, I had two ad units per page so that’s from half a million page loads!).
If I can’t make more than $76 a month from half a million page loads linked to an affiliate I give up!
David
Making Money Online with a Funny Jokes Site?
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