At the beginning, while the post about it was still new and while not all my digg friends saw it I got about 10-15 ad views. I did not put any tracking code on the site, but most of the visits came from this blog and digg. The number of visits was low, so there wasn’t any income. After that it got worse.

By the start of week two I had absolutle no visits. I expected this should change when google will crawl my site. I was wrong. Google detected all the articles for being duplicates and so it penalized the site really bad. I could not even find it in on the 20th page for the keyword. Income from the ads? well…if no visits, no income.

Should I try to make another one and see if I can do better? NO! Google will penalize the site for duplicate content, and the users will also get information that is not well researched all the time and also they can find the same info on other websites. If you want a good website, get a domain, write articles (unique articles) do some marketing campaigns and you should start earning money.

Auto-content websites are actually simple websites that have content crawled from free content directories, posted in the pages of the website with some ads and also includes a RSS feed from other websites. The content is crawled with a simple software that you can find on the net. The owner runs the software, introduces some keywords, places the ads and thats all. Once the files are uploaded he doesn’t have to do almost anything. At least not write fresh content daily.

I also downloaded a software like this. It is called HyperVRE and it is available for free on the internet. With a simple Google search you will find many links from where to download this software. Once you have it installed all you have to do enter some keywords, let it search for articles, paste your Adsense code (or any other PTC) and upload the files. You don’t have to write not even one article.

This software looks really cool, but is it really earning money or it is better to write your own content. In the next month I will make a little experiment. Using HyperVRE I made a car insurance website. I placed my Adsense ads with a custom channel and in the next month I will monitor to see how much this website will earn. I must mention that I used high-paying keywords (car insurance). You may say that you can’t earn money if you don’t have visitors. That is right. I will also make a small campaign to spread the word about this website. Even this article that has a link to the website will help the website get indexed by google and other search engines. I will also post the link on some forums and also digg this website.

I did not put any Analytics or tracking code because I am not interested on the number of visitors or the quality of visitors. I am only interested in the money it is making. So, if you want to know if auto-content websites earn money, than come back to my blog to find out. I will also post some details about it every time something exciting happens (for example I got a 10$ click)