The Study Published on the Ezoic Blog, It Appears That Word Counts Could Be Accounting for a 50% to 400% Difference in Page RPM on the Same Website

Some exciting new research has emerged for online publishers about the effect that article word counts have on digital ad revenue. Inspired by a case study recently presented at Google offices in New York, artificial intelligence platform, Ezoic, shared some interesting new information about the relationship between content word count and total page revenue. This information was shared in a post on the company’s blog.

“Our entire platform is built on helping publishers capture and use data to make better decisions automatically. Recently, we launched an exclusive suite of new website analytics tools on our platform. After our customers started to dig into the data, it didn’t take us long to learn that word counts were playing a very interesting role in the amount of revenue that publishers generated from their web properties,” said Ezoic’s Head of Marketing, Tyler Bishop.

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In fact, in the study published on the Ezoic blog, it appears that word counts could be accounting for a 50% to 400% difference in page RPM on the same website. While some of the data might seem apparent to publishers, what’s interesting is the aspects of the data that seem to be slightly less clear-cut.

There were 4 very different websites featured in the Ezoic blog study, and each one saw different word counts serve as the top earner. While every website did serve a separate niche and a different audience, there didn’t seem to be a pattern to easily diagnose which word counts and sites tended to see the highest revenues.

“We had customers using our Big Data Analytics tools start coming to us to share these unique insights. They wanted to know if advertisers were paying more for certain word counts or if it was something unique about word counts on just their website. It’s likely a little bit of both, but you have to access the data to even understand how it might work on any particular site because every site we look at is different. That’s why we decided to publish the study. We’ve had customers completely change the way they create new content based on this data,” Bishop continued.

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Word count is not traditionally seen as a metric core to digital ad earnings for publishers, but Bishop believes that may change. “It’s not like word count is some kind of new critical metric for publishers to optimize around; however, we were surprised at how many didn’t really know how it was correlating with things like total Engagement Time and page RPM. This is stuff content creators can use to make more money and better connect with their audiences.”

Bishop believes that the relationships between ad revenue, page attributes, and user behavior run much deeper than just word counts.

“Ultimately, there are a lot of interesting pieces of information that publishers may not really be thinking about that they probably should. Understanding the relationship between page engagement, ad revenue, and the actual page content is something we think everyone should understand, but it is largely not being looked in great detail by a lot of publishers. And, if they are, many aren’t able to translate it into anything meaningful. That’s what we do and our customers seem to love it,” Bishop finished.

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