Best way to get frustred from your income - calculate the IPU

About one year ago, ShoeMoney posted in his blog…

IPU is also a really valuable tool I use to evaluate domains for purchase. Many people can tell you what kind of income they are making with AdSense, azoogleads, cj, but that doesn’t mean that you are going to make that much. Niches flux a lot but traffic is traffic and I know that *I* can consistently make a min of 2 cents per uniq and if its a niche that I am familiar with I could say that I know I can make as much as 9 cents per uniq user.

That was one year ago and I should think the standard has been raised a bit. Most of you probably have read that Jeremy Schoemaker’s tip for calculating the IPU - Income Per Use. This way you can see how much you earn from each visitor who enters your website, and not from each click, as the CTR (Click Though Rate) could be low on some sites, and does not reflect the actual income on a website that run a several monetizing programs. So, IPU allows you so see how much does your traffic worth. Jeremy also said in his blog, that he generated an average of 9 cents per visitor (which was over a year ago, don’t forget), and if you make 2 (or less) cents per user (not per click, per user!) you are at great loss.

I decided to calculate how much do I make per user here at toptut.com and honestly it was the most frustrating experience. Is that all, I asked myself? After having added everything I use to monetize this site to my earnings bucket (sponsored reviews were included), I reached 1 cent per user. So, my revenue, which I was already started to be proud of, is in fact half of what is not good enough already.

This makes me think. While the Click Through Rate in this blog was gradually growing (in fact with the new layout structure it has tripled itself over the past 2 months), I still need to pull my revenue up and make it about ten times bigger, in order to achieve a more or less “good” revenue level.

At present I have no clue how to do it. If at present I have 1000+ unique visitors a day, and the most logical step towards increasing the revenue is setting a goal of 10,000 visitors a day, but, the IPU will probably still stay equal in percentage, right? If I made last month 8,4$ from every 1k daily users, i.e. I will be making 84,0$ a day from 10k daily visitors. This makes sense, but the Income Per User will remain the same. So how on earth can I pull the IPU up without trying to scam my users with overpriced products or showering this blog with adverts that will end up dominating? I honestly have no clue. Anyway, if you wanna make yourself feel unworthy and see how measly your income is, calculate the IPU by taking the overall income per month and dividing it by the number of visitors. You will get frustrated, don’t say I didn’t warn you.