You might have the awesome fortune of having a post go viral or a surge in traffic for a few days. What can seem like the perfect recipe for high earnings, doesn’t always turn out that way.
Advertisers are used to a certain volume of impressions from your website each day. They use something called nodes to group sites that reach different thresholds of impressions to know how to allocate their campaign volume. If your website slowly increases its impressions and progresses into the next higher node, advertisers have time to account for the increase.
When this node progression happens in a matter of hours and lasts throughout a day, advertisers don’t expect the volume and don’t have appropriate campaigns set up to fill all of the increased ad calls. This can result in disproportionate pageviews to the revenue generated.
The more often your site crosses into higher nodes, the more likely advertisers will be prepared to meet the volume so don’t be discouraged thinking that the increase in pageviews is all for naught!