My journey to building a massive website

5 million monthly visitors on display at $20 RPM is actually a reasonable path, ran a single authority site up to 2.3M monthly uniques before the HCU wiped about 60% of it overnight, and even at that scale mediavine was only hitting $18-22 RPM depending on the month. the EMD portfolio trap is real, i consolidated 14 sites into one big topical authority play in 2021 and the ad revenue per visitor nearly doubled just from the improved session depth metrics.

angryPixel said:

5 million monthly visitors on display at $20 RPM is actually a reasonable path, ran a single authority site up to 2.3M monthly uniques before the HCU wiped about 60% of it overnight, and even at that scale mediavine was only hitting $18-22 RPM depending on the month. the EMD portfolio trap is real, i consolidated 14 sites into one big topical authority play in 2021 and the ad revenue per visitor nearly doubled just from the improved session depth metrics.

Click to expand...

Yes that was the goal when I first started this journey but not sure if it's possible. I'll keep working on it and we'll se in a few more years

That's interesting! How is that consolidated site doing today? Or is that the one you said got wiped after HCU?

Yesterday the site had its first day with 2000+ clicks on GSC! March has been a bit up and down. Might still be looking at a new record month both in terms of traffic and earnings, still a few more days left.

Carolus Rex said:

Somehow I forgot to post the February update. Been a bit stressed lately with moving to another city and school. Just wanted to tell you guys the RPM is slowly increasing and the earnings with that. Here's a screenshot of the RPM and earnings for the past week or so Still would like to see at least 50% higher RPM but it is what it is. I'll post two updates next week.

View attachment 513619

Time to start thinking about taxes and setting up a business, just need to save up €2.5k first but should be done before the summer.

Click to expand...

Congrats! But it seems like the RPM is lower than Journey’s. Or am I comparing it to December’s RPM?

All the best for the journey.

Thomas Shelby said:

Congrats! But it seems like the RPM is lower than Journey’s. Or am I comparing it to December’s RPM?

Click to expand...

Yeah it's not really growing how I was hoping when I first joined PubNation. The RPM seems to be about the same as Journey back in December, a bit higher some days. We did some manual ad placements and configurations but don't really see any effects of that yet. I'll wait a bit more and later contact them again to see if we can improve it further.

New all-time-high in earnings and RPM in a single day was on the 26th.

Carolus Rex said:

Yeah it's not really growing how I was hoping when I first joined PubNation. The RPM seems to be about the same as Journey back in December, a bit higher some days. We did some manual ad placements and configurations but don't really see any effects of that yet. I'll wait a bit more and later contact them again to see if we can improve it further.

New all-time-high in earnings and RPM in a single day was on the 26th.

Click to expand...

I see. When you look at the ads yourself, do you think they’re much better than Journey’s, like bigger brands and so on? And as we talked about in DM before, I don’t see any empty ad slots either on my website after I switched, so I’m really confused about why the RPM isn’t growing that much for you. :/

February update

I think I wrote the wrong month for the January update but whatever. I'll just go through the stats real quick.

So February, being the shortest month of the year, I didn't think it would do as well as it did. We did see new record in earnings. Here's the GSC:



While we are growing, it seems we have stagnated a bit and jump between positions in the SERP. In February I added a page for users to request new pages to be added, lets just say my audience is very stupid. They enter either pages I already have (as if they think it's a search function when the page and form clearly states otherwise) or just put "???". I will go through the list and see which ones are worth adding. Probably will remove this request feature as it didn't work out the way I was hoping.

Stats for Analytics (compared to January)

Unique visitors: 54k
Sessions: 81k (-2k)
Page views: 141k (-3k)
Time on page: 1m 18s (-5 seconds)

Overall traffic is down from January but seeing as we get 3 days less in February that was expected.

Earnings for February: $735 (+$112)
Average RPM: $9.11

Didn't really do much to the website in February since I was busy with moving. I'll post the March update shortly.

Thomas Shelby said:

I see. When you look at the ads yourself, do you think they’re much better than Journey’s, like bigger brands and so on? And as we talked about in DM before, I don’t see any empty ad slots either on my website after I switched, so I’m really confused about why the RPM isn’t growing that much for you. :/

Click to expand...

Sorry missed to answer your message. I didn't really check the quality of the ads on Journey but I feel like it should be a bit higher quality on PubNation. RPMs are really going all over the place, gonna reach out to them again and see if they can do something else. But aren't ads today more targeted based on the users internet history and cookies?

Is there a way to see how many are using adblockers? Would be interesting to see as I've just assumed my audience dont know how to block ads haha.

Carolus Rex said:

Sorry missed to answer your message. I didn't really check the quality of the ads on Journey but I feel like it should be a bit higher quality on PubNation. RPMs are really going all over the place, gonna reach out to them again and see if they can do something else. But aren't ads today more targeted based on the users internet history and cookies?

Is there a way to see how many are using adblockers? Would be interesting to see as I've just assumed my audience dont know how to block ads haha.

Click to expand...

All good! Yes, quality-wise, it should be better.

Hmm, that’s true. I didn’t think about that one.

Unfortunately, no. Probably by checking the logs on Cloudflare or your server, but then again, it’s probably mixed in with bots, etc.

March Update

Ok, so March did pretty well compared to previous months. Everything seems to be up except for the time on page. Something good seems to be happening right now, looking forward to the April update!

Recently I found out I'm a bit more unwell than I previously thought. Had a psychosis a few weeks back and realized after that it wasn't the first one, most likely not the last one either. So tired of not getting help in this shit hole country, been waiting forever. Just thought I'd share since I've mentioned my mental health previously in the thread.

Anyways, here's the GSC for March:



Google Analytics (Compared to February)

Unique visitors: 61k (+7k)
Sessions: 90k (+9k)
Page views: 155k (+14k)
Time on page: 1m 12s (-6 seconds)

Earnings in March: $870 (+$135)
Average RPM: $9.61

RPM was still below $10 but it looks like it's finally getting better. Too early to say if this is just temporary or if this is the new normal. April 10th for example saw an RPM of $17.96 and an ATH earning of $77.52. By a freak accident it happened to be my birthday that day as well, a nice little surpsrise

Happy belated birthday and hope you get better soon!

I just wanted to share the past 12 months with you guys real quick. 1 year ago I thought the website was completely dead and there would be no recovery.. The site had been pushed out of the SERPs for just about 5 months after the site was hit by the GCU back in December 2024. In May 2025 the site got a second chance after I removed a lot of pages and translations. Today I am one of the most talked about websites in the niche, I constantly see new organic backlinks placed on authority sites within the niche as well as Reddit threads talking about me, mostly in a good way.

Here's what I had to say about it in the update last year:

Carolus Rex said:

Now come December, the website did grow quite a bit initially with around 1200-1300 clicks daily and all-time-high of 1509 clicks. But as you can see just before Christmas it got hit by the algorithm. Still we managed to make $155 for the month which wasnt all that bad.

Click to expand...

One single day, 1509 clicks. Now we are at 2000+ every single day. RPM is still pretty shit, even though it went up a bit the past few weeks, it did drop down some again.

Here's the GSC for the past 12 months for reference. It's been a rough year and I'm hopeful the next 12 months we will get us even higher.

Congrats on the growth!

Could you be more specific about what kind of page you removed? Maybe that could also help me revive my site.

Thanks!

April Update

Another month has passed. The site keeps growing, last month I mentioned the RPM seems to improve a lot but that was more a temporary thing. We did get a few days with RPMs of $17-18 but most of the month we were hovering around $11-$12, still an improvement.

Lets get to the traffic. Here's the GSC for April:



And here is the Google Analytics.
Unique visitors: 70k (+9k)
Sessions: 103k (+13k)
Page views: 179k (+24k)
Time on Page: 1m 12s (+0)

Traffic grew quite a bit in April and we're seeing even better days the first week of May, both in terms of traffic and earnings. While the RPM is growing, it's still so low. I will analyze a few pages that I changed last month and see if the ad impressions and earnings increased or not.

Here are the earnings.

Earnings in April: $1191 (+$321)
Average RPM: $11.56 (+$1.95)

We've finally passed $1000/month which is a huge milestone, this is enough for a modest life in a lot of countries (unfortunately not my country). Next milestones I want to check is 100k unique visitors and 100k organic clicks in GSC.

Thomas Shelby said:

Congrats on the growth!

Could you be more specific about what kind of page you removed? Maybe that could also help me revive my site.

Thanks!

Click to expand...

Thanks mate! First I have to clarify that all my pages has the same one template, they all look the same and has minimum written content (just one paragraph).

This means it's not as simple as just removing low quality articles. What I did instead was to first remove all the translated pages which acted as separate pages in Google, removed TranslatePress all together, not sure if that plugin is bad or not but I won't use it again. These pages were 301 to their english original.

After that I also went back to my best months when the site was ranking, wrote down all the pages that got 0-10 clicks per month and just removed them all. These removed pages were 301 to the homepage. I also updated the sitemaps in Search Console, not sure if that did anything though as it took a bit until Google started indexing me again.

Aside from the translations I think I removed about 60% of all pages. Might seem a bit extreme but I believe the update back in 2024 was about stopping spam, and I had uploaded pages quite agressively the months leading up to the update.

This will most probably not work for everyone, but that's exactly what I did at least.

Looking more closely on PubNation I can see I have US RPM at $29, and some really low $0.8-$1.5 RPM from other countries. I don't think I can increase the US traffic, at least not by much. If anyone has any ideas I'm all ears.

Carolus Rex said:

Thanks mate! First I have to clarify that all my pages has the same one template, they all look the same and has minimum written content (just one paragraph).

This means it's not as simple as just removing low quality articles. What I did instead was to first remove all the translated pages which acted as separate pages in Google, removed TranslatePress all together, not sure if that plugin is bad or not but I won't use it again. These pages were 301 to their english original.

After that I also went back to my best months when the site was ranking, wrote down all the pages that got 0-10 clicks per month and just removed them all. These removed pages were 301 to the homepage. I also updated the sitemaps in Search Console, not sure if that did anything though as it took a bit until Google started indexing me again.

Aside from the translations I think I removed about 60% of all pages. Might seem a bit extreme but I believe the update back in 2024 was about stopping spam, and I had uploaded pages quite agressively the months leading up to the update.

This will most probably not work for everyone, but that's exactly what I did at least.

Click to expand...

Thank you so much for the detailed response. I really appreciate it!

A quick rant

Ahhh.. This niche is so annoying to work with. Still steady rankings but I see most of the old "new" sites that started spamming the same way I did before I got penalized have now disappeared from the SERPs. Sometimes I wish I were in a steady niche, where I just had to fight the big guys and not have to worry too much about the newcomers...

The problem is they know its a good niche so they keep building new sites. Well, the biggest problem is that they copy my site, some not only spin my words they also steal my images!

What can I do about that?

I guess one good thing about them copying me is they see me as a big player, so kind of validating for me at the same time.

Thoughts about Google AI

Also been thinking a lot lately about this new upcoming Google AI Search and how it may affect my traffic. Did a quick check on Semrush for all my competitors and let's just say some of my biggest competitors are starting to see some decline in keywords and traffic this past month. According to Semrush I also have much better AI mentions, I've seen my domain pop up a lot in the AI snippet and on Chat GPT so I think that's a pretty good sign.

What I'm doing currently

I'm still working on building new pages to the site, also been trying to add some support pages and more content on some pages just to test if they will perform better.

Still want to diversify a bit and build more websites but it's difficult finding low hanging fruits like the main site. Launched another quick tool about a month ago but that one is not doing too well, will wait and see what happens.

Found a new calculator type website yesterday that ranks #2 for the main Keyword (nothing major, 1k-10k Monthly searches according to Keyword Planner) that I might try to target. That website was launched back in January and has grown a lot in a short period of time, fresh domain with very low metrics and not much competition at all.

Feels like I'm going blind trying to hunt these gems down. What tools and Tactics do you guys use when researching and finding new niches and topics today? The methods I used back in the day don't really seems to be as good now.

A bit late update but here we go. I'll keep it short this time.

May was an amazing month, feels like we are finally getting somewhere. These are the GSC stats for the month:



Massive growth from the month before, that my friends is a 24% increase in clicks, absolutely insane. We seem to be stalling for June though so maybe we're close to the limit. Checking the rankings I now rank #2 for almost every single secondary keyword, about 5-6 keywords I've over taken my biggest competitor which feels really good. The main Keyword (bringing in about 40% of my total traffic) is still ranking #3 so there's more room to grow.

The May Google core update didn't seem to do any damage at all.

For Google Analytics we are looking at the following.

Unique visitors: 88k (+18k)
Sessions: 130k (+27k)
Page views: 230k (+51k)
Time on Page: 1m 15s (+3s)

Again, this is crazy growth... Still pretty low RPMs though. What I would give to have $20+ RPM right now. Anyways, earnings for May is a new high.

Earnings in May: $1639 (+$448)
Average RPM: $12.57 (+$1.01)

Looks like June may be just slightly lower overall but I think we can get $1500+ at least.

Damn, look at the stats and earnings!

Happy for you!