Hubpages Ad Program - My initial thoughts and earnings

As I mentioned in my February 2011 earnings update, Hubpages have recently launched their own personal ad program.  For a long time Hubpages have been showing their own banner adverts on their share of page impressions, now they have given the option to Hubbers to take part in this scheme on their 60% of impressions.  Hubpages will deal with the advertising networks and will just pass on the revenue to individuals through PayPal (presumably after taking their cut).  The scheme was recently trialled with a very small number of individuals (I believe it was 7 who get very high traffic to their hubs) who on average saw a 60% uplift in earnings.  Now a further 500 people have been invited and it is planned to invite the remainder of hubbers by mid 2011 (so if you haven't heard anything yet don't despair!).  I was fortunate enough to be one of the lucky people to be included in this initial 500 so here is my views on the scheme.

If you are yet to sign up to Hubpages why not do so now?  I continue to earn in excess of £100 (over $150) most months from Hubpages from about 40 articles I wrote a year ago, so it is true passive income.   

I am unable to comment on the Hubpages ad program and it's effect on the page layout, since I think I am yet to see any such ads either on my own page or anyone else's when browsing Hubpages.  I am not sure why this is, unless it is the Hubpages ad program only currently distributes ads to those viewing Hubpages from specific regions, such as USA or North America.  

Whilst the Hubpages as program isn't in response to the 'Google farmer update' it definitely will help with keeping up the earnings if the traffic does continue to remain at the levels which are lower than previously.  So far I have been a member of the scheme for almost a week and whilst not long enough to provide a definitive answer for the exact effect on earnings, it should provide enough of an indication of earnings rates.

Initial indications for myself are that it has resulted in about a 20% increase in earnings per thousand impressions (CPM).  I have come to this figure by adding the CPM for the Hubpages ad program to my Hubpages Adsense CPM, which has dropped (as one would expect since there are now less Adsense ads per hub and more competition).  In total I would estimate I have since a drop in Adsense revenue of about 10%-20% since starting the Hubpages ad program.

I would attach a couple of caveats to my figure of 20%.  Firstly, there is only a very small amount of data I am basing this on (my own personal rather limited Hubpages traffic over just 5 days).  Secondly, it is hard to tell exactly what this uplift should be is since it has happened at a similar time to the Google Farmer Update which as far as I can tell has affected traffic from Google.com more than from the rest of the world (and obviously USA traffic on average has a higher CPM).  Therefore, I reckon that this estimate of 20% increase in earnings may actually be an underestimate and the Hubpages ad program is returning better returns than the numbers themselves would indicate.

Have you used the Hubpages ad program yet?  Have you seen any increase in earnings?  As always feel free to comment using the box below!