I completely agree. That's why I said the OP won't make much if he is getting John McCain ads. Nobody, and I mean nobody, was clicking on John McCain ads. Politics is not a good niche to make money. The EPC was not bad, but clicks were very few and far between with excellent Adsense placement.
Back in Jan/Feb when the primary was at full momentum, I saw that McCain & Hillary were paying big per click. That lasted about two weeks. I'm moving my site toward political economy ... "dollar" or "interest rate" has a CPC many times higher than "election." Of course, competition is higher, traffic is lower...
I'm wondering if I switched my focus from politics to economy which would cover politics but also finance if that would help?
That would help if your readers are into finance related content. I did the same thing, discussing home foreclsoures effect on the economy. Many of the ads were foreclsoure related and paid much better. But the CTR was still low even with great placement.
I guess my main option right now would probably be to start all over again. I'll come up with a good design and popular niche and see. BTW anyone has any idea how much the "car blog" niche pays? Is it a good niche? Cause I am into cars and know quite a bit about them and wanted to use it as my next project.
It depends on where those 500 views are coming from and how many uniques you have. If you are getting mostly social bookmarking traffic, it has a low conversion rate and you will see little in the way of clicks. If it is all targeted organic traffic, I would say $1 or less a day unless you are talking 500 uniques a day.
You do know that was only the pre-game show don't you? I'd say the traffic will be about 50x what it was Jan/Feb come November