When I started this blog back in August 2016, I started it solely because I wanted to keep stuff I might need again documented for myself. At this time, I didn’t even think of monetizing my blog, nor did I know that it would be possible. It wasn’t until a full year later that I realized that I almost hit the 10.000 views a month mark. This was where I actually started to look for ways to monetize the blog. I fill you in on the details below. I wanted to create this Ezoic Review because they really were a Game Changer for me and my business.

This also isn’t a sales pitch for Ezoic. I actually reached out to them myself to get an invite to their affiliate system. I want to write this Ezoic Review because I really believe in their product and I want to share my experience with it. I am a Cybersecurity and Linux blogger, so writing about business and revenue isn’t really my niche, but I thought I could give you a more real-world perspective of how someone like me uses Ezoic compared to all the other Ezoic Reviews that exist mostly on SEO or professional Blogging websites.

If you have read any of my other (rare) reviews on this website, you know that I only endorse stuff that I use myself. This is no difference. In this Ezoic Review, I will also give you honest insights into my revenue and how it developed over the years, which should give you an idea about how consistent effort can translate to a valuable asset.

Putting this Ezoic Review together costs a lot of time, so if you like it and choose to sign up with them I would be highly appreciative if you use my affiliate link, giving me a small return on my work. Ok, let’s dive right in.

Pocket Money

Picking up where we left off above, let’s dig a bit deeper into my history with Ad Revenue. As I said, I started monetizing around the 10.000 views a Month mark. Naturally, as probably most of us, I started out with Google Adsense.

I run a WordPress Blog, so implementing Adsense is really easy. The hardest part was actually waiting to get approved from Adsense, which took a couple of months. After implementing Adsense I went through the whole ordeal of setting up Ads in different locations, testing their potential and reading countless very frustrating blog articles on how to optimize ad revenue. I can’t stress enough how much this annoyed me. I wanted to write tutorials, not optimize Ad placements. Another reason by the way, why I decided to go with Ezoic and write this Ezoic Review, more on that later.

My Google Adsense earnings in 2017

In the whole year of 2017, I made a whopping 178,48$ USD. Did I mention that I was already blogging for 1 1/2 years at that point? So you can see, you have to endure through this time and keep persistent if you want to make it in this business. This didn’t even cover the server cost I had at this time, so I actually made minus in 2017. I didn’t earn a single cent in the first year.

I didn’t pay too much attention to Ad optimization at this point because I was still believing I would never make this profitable, considering the number of hours I already put into it.

Taking things a bit more serious

As you can see at the end of this graph, there is a huge increase in revenue. This is the deliciousness that is Christmas or Holiday Revenue. Every year around December, Ad Revenue increases like crazy for a month before hitting rock-bottom in January. A toast on capitalism.

At the end of 2017, when I have seen that I made almost 80$ USD a month, it dawned on me. I had to take Ad Optimization more seriously. And I did.

Throughout 2018 I started to read countless articles on Ad Optimization, but I never even considered changing from Google Adsense to another advertiser, all the research I did, didn’t lead anywhere. Everybody’s conses was, stick with Google, it’s the best. And so I did.

My Google Adsense earnings in 2018

In the year 2018 things changed for me. I put out more content and I started to take my business more seriously and treat it as an actual business. I had a lot to learn. In December 2017, I had 25.000 visits a month. Within one year later, in December 2018, I closed into 50.000 views a month. This was a huge milestone and It showed in my revenue. I made 1998.47$ USD in 2018. That was a great achievement, yet nowhere near to fulfill my ultimate goal: becoming a full-time content creator and blogger.

Within 2018, I also tried Google Auto Ads, which basically is an automated ad placement system from Google itself. This would take the hassle of experimenting with Ad Placement manually out of the equation. It would if it would have worked.

I tried Adsense Auto Ads for a month and had a huge drop in revenue compared to my carefully placed manual Ads. I ditched it and never looked back.

Right around the time I hit the 50.000 views a Month mark, I got a Linked.in message from Mike McGuire, the CEO of Ezoic.

First Contact with Ezoic

Mike contacted me and tried to pitch me with: “Can I book 15 minutes of your time to outline how sites like yours can leverage native data from their readers to improve user experience and revenue?“.

To be honest, I wouldn’t even reply if there wasn’t the P.S. he included at the end of the Email: “I notice you practice BJJ (our CMO’s wife is a world champion – Tyler himself won Bronze Medal at the 2017 European Championship)”.

Being a long-time Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner myself, I certainly appreciated his effort in doing his research.

We wrote a couple of emails back and forth, I did some research on my end and based on it, decided to not go for Ezoic for the time being.

Don’t get me wrong, their product was already sparking some interest in me. There was nothing I would have liked more than completely automating the serving of my Ads, which consumes a LOT of time done manually with A/B testing et cetera.

The Year 2019

My Monthly visits kept rising, so did my Ad Revenue from Google. At the end of 2018, I hit the 300$ USD mark in Ad Revenue. This was promising I thought. Maybe this could become a full-time gig in the end? I didn’t think of changing anything as my revenue kept rising. In March 2019 I cracked the 75.000 visits a month mark. Another huge increase in visits, and in Ad Revenue.

Second Contact with Ezoic

In June 2019 I made 333$ USD. This was nice, but not nice enough. This was the time I got contacted by another sales rep from Ezoic. He sent me a long email and we got talking. I immediately liked the guy, he was very straight forward and honest in what he tried to sell me. We actually had a lot of casual conversation in the process, which I enjoyed. (We are still in contact to this day checking in on each other once in a while).

Ultimately, he convinced me to go with the free version of Ezoic and giving it a trial run.

I did a little bit more research and what triggered my decision was that Ezoic is an actual Certified Publishing Partner of Google. So their legitimacy was confirmed for me.

I didn’t think so much about increasing my revenue but more about completely automating the whole Ad thing and not need to think about it anymore. Ezoic uses artificial intelligence to permanently improve the Ad placement, so it takes care of itself 100%.

Ezoic in its basic form is completely free. The only thing they do after 30 days is to place a tiny Ezoic Ad at the bottom of your page, which didn’t bother me at all.

It was the beginning of July when I decided to make the switch over to Ezoic. You can see that represented in my 2019 Google Adsense Revenue, as it drops down to almost 0.

Making the Switch to Ezoic

I have to honestly say, part of why I decided to write this rather long Ezoic Review was because of how satisfied I was with the integration process. My rep, Dan, literally took care of everything (Good Job Dan, you sure do know your stuff!).

I already was using the Ad Inserter plugin to serve my Ads, so all I needed to do was wrapping them in some Ezoic code, so they could use them as placeholders for their AI. I also needed to adjust some Nameserver settings with my hoster, which was easy because Dan took me through, step-by-step and was answering every single question I had with patience and competence.

The setup was finished rather quickly and I was amazed at how easy it was. I thought it would be much more of a hassle. By now, you probably can tell that I am really satisfied with their integration process.

The First Month (June 2019)

Alright, this is probably the part why you choose to read an Ezoic Review in the first place, the Revenue! It took a couple of days for the AI to ramp up, but I knew that.

Also, the summer months over June – September are usually seeing another drop in Ad Revenue with August being the lowest of the Summer months.

Remember the 333$ USD I made in June?

I started to see the first revenue on June 4. About three days later, on a Sunday (Usually the lowest day of the week by far), I had earned 24$ USD, the highest-earning per Day I ever had. On a Sunday. It sure looked to be good to be true, but revenue kept rising.

I made 811$ USD in July. That’s more than double what I have ever made before with Google Adsense. I was impressed and very happy, to say the least. Maybe this makes it a bit clearer why I decided to write an Ezoic Review.

The Second Month (August 2019)

As mentioned above, Ad Revenue usually drops a bit again in August, which it did in my case. I contacted Dan and he sent me an interesting graph which represents Ad rates by day over the course of a year. It’s called the Online Ad Revenue Index.

You can clearly see Ad rates are the highest in December, followed by a huge drop in January, then they slowly start to rise again towards summer and they drop again in Mid-July / August. This was an accurate representation of what happened to my revenue.

Admittedly a small drop, but a drop nevertheless. I didn’t care tho, it was still way more than I had earned with Google Adsense. In August 2019, I made 753$ USD. Nice!

The Third Month (September 2019)

My visits a Month were pretty similar throughout those months, so you can really see that the AI is working and increasing revenue, even when the traffic stays approximately the same. (The rise in traffic you see in October was around 10k false traffic I got out of some reason, so it’s actually 86k in October).

Anticipating the revenue to rise again in September, I wasn’t disappointed. Ezoic’s AI kept working it’s magic, creating me more revenue, and at the same time marking another almost-milestone. In September 2019, I made 989$ USD, almost cracking the 1000$ USD mark for the first time ever!

This surely made me happy.

You probably think I went out and spend all the sweet Ad money on laptop stickers and candy, but no. I actually re-invested every single cent back into Ceos3c, buying a new camera to improve the video quality on my YouTube channel, a new Microphone to improve sound quality and a new laptop to be able to take my laptop wherever I go instead of carrying my heavy, old Thinkpad with me all the time.

I also invested in an Elgato Cam Link and proper Studio Lighting.

I was finally able to do a long-overdue upgrade of my studio equipment, thanks to Ezoic. The dream of becoming a full-time Content Creator just came a bit closer.

Ezoic Premium

At the end of September, I got a popup message in my Ezoic Dashboard saying that I was invited to the Ezoic Premium Program. I thought, alright, here we go. That’s the point where they are going to earn serious $ from me. (At this point I was still using the completely free version of Ezoic).

I actually contacted Dan once more about Ezoic Premium, at this point he probably answered a hundred Emails from me already. I asked him if the thinks it would be worthy for me. He replied that all of the customers who went for premium were very satisfied with the results.

Once again, I listened to Dan who proved himself to be trustworthy in every decision I made so far and went for it. I got two weeks of Free Premium Trial at first.

They have different tiers, starting with 70$ per month, depending on how much revenue your site creates. If you earn more than a certain limit, you have to choose the higher-tier plan. I had 3 options at that time: 4-Star Basic, Preferred or Elite.

Each of the tiers having more benefits, the 4 Star Elite Tier weighing in with 288$ USD per month. That sounded a lot at first, but I had the two weeks of free Premium, so I went for the 4-Star Elite.

They basically give you an estimate of what your earnings will be. For the Elite plan, it was 330$ USD – 420$ USD per month. That’s definitely more than the plan costs. Now, the great thing with this is, even if you do not hit 288$ in Premium Ad Revenue out of some reason, they automatically set you to a lower tier, so you don’t lose any money. Great.

Premium also gives you a higher priority on all premium advertiser campaigns and some other goodies, generating more non-premium revenue for you as well.

The Fourth Month (October 2019)

And oh boy, did it create more revenue! October came as a surprise. After opting in for premium, I was in for a surprise. As I said before, this Ezoic Review is a real-world example of how I implemented Ezoic on my own business, so I’m being completely transparent.

Here are my October 2019 Earnings with Ezoic Premium.

Yes, you read that right. In October 2019 I made 1800$ USD. Doubling my September earnings after opting in for Ezoic Premium. I will do a separate Ezoic Premium Review in a future article if this finds some traction, let me know in the comments below if you are interested in that.

Of course, we need to subtract the 288$ USD Premium fee from this, which still leaves us with 1512$ USD. For me, the move to Premium was well worth it.

Ezoic Website Performance and Settings

Now, one thing upfront: If you don’t like Ezoic, you can turn it off with a button click in the Ezoic Dashboard, going back to your old Adsense Setup with a mouse click. Apart from that, you can tell Ezoic how it should act on your Website regarding Revenue and User Experienced.

You can also go for Custom and set everything in percentages, as you like. I went for Balanced, as this seems to be the best option to give you guys a good mix of User Experience and Revenue for me. As all content is free on Ceos3c, I rely 100% on Ad Revenue.

If my Patreon would get more traction, I’d happily reduce the Ads and focus more on User Experience, which is hopefully possible in the future.

The Ezoic Site Speed Accelerator

This is another point that I want to treat separately. In the previous years, I have spent way more time doing research on how to improve WordPress page speed than I had ever wished for. I went through months of testing all the different popular plugins like WP Super Cache, Autoptimize, WP Fastest Cache and even the paid version of WP-Rocket (that had the best results of the bunch, but just by a hair, not really worth the premium).

That being said, I spent countless hours reading through posts and optimizing my settings, just to hit scores that were at best average and in the low 60’s. Ezoic recently has released the so-called Site Speed Accelerator and I was invited to participate in a free trial. They guarantee you a score above 90. I was skeptical, to put it mildly.

My Google Pagespeed Results before switching to Ezoic Site Speed Accelerator

My GT Metrix Scores before switching to Ezoic Site Speed Accelerator

As always, Ezoic helped me to set everything up. It was only a couple of mouse clicks that I could have done myself pretty quickly (much easier than all the other WordPress Site Speed plugins!). After switching it on, I gave it a day or so to set itself up.

I tested my WordPress site speed again the next morning and I was quite baffled at what I was looking at.

My Google Pagespeed Results after switching to Ezoic Site Speed Accelerator

My GT Metrix Scores after switching to Ezoic Site Speed Accelerator

Was I wasting all those hours trying to optimize this myself? It sure seems like. In the beginning, I couldn’t really believe my eyes, but even Google Lighthouse Audits had the same result. The site was loading lighting fast on every device. I guess I was sold (if it wasn’t already free).

I was curious so I contacted Ezoic’s CEO to ask him about the App and why it was working that efficiently. He couldn’t fill me in on any details, but he told me that they had spent a couple of million GPB to develop this App and to disrupt the WordPress Page Speed / Caching market. I think they are on the right way.

I definitely will stick with it. If you sing up with them now, you can still use the Ezoic Site Speed Accelerator App completely free, even with your free Ezoic account! I recommend you to try it out. Be aware that you have to temporarily disable your existing WordPress Page Speed Plugin for this to work. But just contact [email protected] if you need help, I am sure they’d be happy to set you up!

Ezoic said the Site Speed Accelerator will probably cost a small monthly fee from some point next year. I’m already sold. I will never spend a minute again to try to optimize my WordPress Site Speed manually. I’ll happily pay this fee. If you happen to try it out, I’d love to hear your comments.

Ezoic Premium Review Conclusion

Now if we look back at what I have earned with Google Adsense before switching over to Ezoic, Ezoic more than quadrupled my earnings, which translates to 454% increased Revenue, within 4 Months. Those numbers certainly convinced me to stick with Ezoic. Especially because I don’t need to mess with any settings myself. Being a Premium Member, I can just shoot an Email to my Rep at Ezoic and they will take care of it, carefully monitoring any changes in the progress.

If this article helped you to decide for Ezoic, I would be more than happy if you use this link to sign up with them, giving me a small commission for referring you to them.

You also can probably tell by now that I personally really like Ezoic, I wouldn’t spend hours writing an article if it wasn’t the real deal and if I didn’t like it. I regularly leave money on the table from companies who approach me to write reviews about their products, but their products suck, so I refuse.

I hope this Ezoic Review could give you real-world insights into an Ezoic integration into an established blog/business and the resulting outcome. Ezoic is working on a case study for my business right now which I will include in this article as soon as it’s available.

That being said, if you want peace of mind and don’t study Ad Ops and especially WordPress Page Speed Optimization, which are a whole profession by themselves, go with Ezoic. And of course, there is the part with the increased revenue, which is nice.

So far, I am very happy with how everything develops and I am looking forward to seeing where it goes from here.

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