The Growth Of Opera Mini Is Hurting My Revenue From Adsense

Opera Mini is an excellent browser for people with limited bandwidth allowance on their phones. I have been using it for perhaps 5 years. Unfortunately for me it has a downside and that is that Opera Mini doesn't display my adsnse units. It is a policy of Opera Inc to strip out what it thinks is unnecessary code from a webpage in order to make the data smaller for the Opera Mini browser.

Peculiar thing is it leaves adverts from many other advertising companies.

2 years ago around 7000 people visiting my website were using Opera Mini, but that has now grown to over 16000 a month. The downside to this increase is that my numbers haven't increased so the opera users have directly replaced visitors that would have seen adverts. With an estimated 1.7 pageviews per visitor I am losing revenue from an extra (16000-7000)*1.7 pageviews each month than 2 years ago. It leads to hundreds of pounds of lost revenue!

My hope is that as mobile operators start to offer more and more bandwidth for less money each month the need for Opera Mini will disappear. At that point I will finally maximise the full potential of my website.

Effect of World Currencies On Adsense Earnings

Over the last 1 and 1/2 years I have noticed a decline in my adsense earnings of around 30%. Now I'm not one of those to instantly blame panda, penguin or any other types of update from google. I much prefer to work out why things change and what if anything I can do to rectify that 30% drop.

Firstly the bad news, it isn't possible to rectify the drop in earnings without increasing the number of visitors. Why isn't it possible? Because the British Pound has strengthened against virtually every currancy in the world including the Dollar, which has adversely affected my earnings.

Most of my visitors are from Indonesia, Japan, the USA and the Philippines, with 1/3 of overall earnings specifically from Indonesia. In 1 and 1/2 years the pound has changed against the Indonesian Rupiah from roughly 14500 rupiah to the pound to 20400 rupiah to the pound. A huge change that directly affects my earnings. The problem is that the average price per cpc advert an Indonesian company has to pay hasn't increased inline with the exchange rate.

Now lets look at the Pound to Japanese Yen. At the beginning of 2012 one pound was worth roughly 138 yen, it is now closer to 170 yen. Not quite as bad as the rupiah but still around a 23% drop.

My long term forcast is that within 5 years the currency market will start moving back in my favour. Until then, on with the day job.