PhD Degree - **** Niche

I have a number of blogs and one of them is on the subject of crime. Not particularly a profitable niche, but it’s a hobby of mine. Anyhow, I’ve posted there a New York Times articles about diploma mills – online “universities” that sell PhD degrees and various kinds of diplomas.

When I put that article up, I was surprised to see a bunch of ads that said “get PhD online” in one way or another. I thought that this was a little bit odd, but I was even more surprised to see how much these ads pay. Wow, PhD degrees rock!

Get this – the diploma mill industry is worth over 500 million a year in US alone. And it’s extremely profitable. Basically, you give two hundred bucks for a piece of paper that has PhD or MBA next to your name, but diploma mills have no fixed costs as such. No campus, no faculty, just a fancy printer.

I believe that diploma mills are illegal, if they claim that these diplomas are real, but as long as they provide a disclaimer, they are perfectly fine.

Do you want a piece of that $500 million a year pie? I bet you do.

If you are curious about how diploma mills operate, you might want to read

Degree Mills: The Billion-dollar Industry That Has Sold Over A Million Fake Diplomas

In order not to violate Google TOS, I rate niches with my own star system. ** - $0.20-$0.30 per click average, *** - $0.30-$0.50 per click average, **** - $0.50-$0.70 per click average, ***** - $0.70-$1.20 per click average. While I don’t mind sharing information on ***** niches, I don’t make this information publicly available because it would quickly kill these niches or get Google pissed off at me.

All AdSense niches were tested by me personally and your results shouldn’t be very different, unless your account was smart-priced, too much time passed since my testing, MFA got a hold of the niche or your site or traffic source sucks big time.