How cool is this. I have to work, but we have the best view of the river from our office so I get to watch the yachts come over the finish line. I took the photo below from my office of Wild Oates taking line honors. She is only the second yacht in history to be the first across the line three times in a row. I like my work!

"Do you make any money from the Google ads on your website?" is a common question I get asked. The answer is "kinda"! Yes I have received a few cheques from Google for the Adsense ads on this site. Do I make a lot of money? No! Could I make a lot of money? Yes! Google have very strict terms and conditions that prevent me from giving you click through rates and stuff like that, but I am free to discuss more general stuff. I obviously know what my own click through rate (Page CTR) is, and I also know how many page impressions are delivered every day. If I had 10 websites just like Tasweb then I could make enough money to eat out at a fancy restaurant on Google's account each week. Unfortunately, I don't have the time or the want to do that. There are many people who do just that and must be making a lot of money out of Google Adsense. There is a very interesting trend occurring though that I've found a lot of other webmaster's talking about. The number of visitor's to Tasweb continues to slowly increase, and that in turns means more clicks per day, however the average earnings per day is dropping substantially. I have attached a graph below that demonstrates this. I have graphed clicks per day and earning's per day for the past six months and then added trend lines for both. The graph jumps all over the place, so you can tell that the numbers are fairly small! I haven't included any figures so I'm pretty sure I'm safe giving you that information. The actual figures aren't important anyway, it's the trends that make the point. Why is it that even though I'm seeing an increasing number of clicks per day that my earnings per day are dropping so quickly? Google is obviously paying less per click, the question is why? Maybe I need to target better paying advertisers, however my major source of traffic hasn't changed during the past six months, so I think it is just that Google are either taking a bigger cut off the top, or they are reducing their price to the advertisers. For some strange reason my Page Rank dropped from 4 to 3 in the middle of that period as well. That reduced the number of visitors that come via Google searches, however I have still managed to maintain a slow increase in traffic overall. What do you think?

Schools out for another year. This year was a bit different to most in that it was the last time that we will be associated with a Primary School. Brad finished at Blackman's Bay this year and will be in Grade 7 at Kingston High School with Emma next year. It's a bit weird saying goodbye to the teachers and staff that you have become so used to over the past 8 or so years. As usual there were a few tears during the leavers assembly, but even I shed a quite tear or two when Brad was announced as the winner of the Arts award. That makes him the best male musician in the school. It came with a $50 gift voucher which was pretty cool as well. Words cannot describe how proud I felt. It was just reward for all of the hard work that Brad has put in during the year on the saxophone and guitar. I had his music teacher at my place one night last week because she had re written a section of The Final Countdown that the Grade 6 band were playing to give Brad a bit of a solo. Brad didn't know about  it and she was only giving him one nights notice to learn it. The funny thing was that Brad had already thought that the arrangement needed a sax solo and had started to transpose a trumpet solo into sax music just to see how it would sound!