martinibuster - 8:05 am on May 2, 2009 (gmt 0)

A civil discussion, not a debate. It's fairly clear there was an AdSense boom time and then a periodof change that affected revenue, or at least it wasn't so easy to turn a buck. Not everyone has experienced a decrease because not everybody is standing still. Nevertheless, I think even those who are making more now than then understand what I'm alluding to as far as how much easier it was to make a buck when the service was new as opposed to now. I am not saying AdSense is dead or not lucrative. I'm just pointing out that there has been a change/growth/whatever and am throwing out the question asking for some reasons why you think this might be so.

Please list your theory, speculation, or wild idea why you think AdSense earnings were higher before than now?

Here is one theory. As I recall, there were thousands of dollars worth of AdWords coupons flooding Internet conferences. Those AdSensers who have not attended conferences several years ago won't know what I'm talking about so before you comment on this theory, hear me out. (Here is a recent example [google.com] of an AdWords promotion that would inject Google money into the system, though probably not on the same scale as in the beginning).

Every conference I went to there were thousands of dollars worth of coupons available from denominations of $250 on down (as I recall). I think there may have been $500 coupons available, too. There were so many coupons floating around that some people were selling them, exchanging them between themselves, and opening multiple AdWords accounts to take advantage of them.

Could part of the higher payouts have to do with there being less publishers in the system? Is it possible that another contributing factor in those early days of higher ECPM was the flood of AdWords coupons?

[edited by: martinibuster at 8:27 am (utc) on May 2, 2009]