photojack - 9:26 pm on Nov 10, 2009 (gmt 0)

Thank you all for your replies.

I thought it was quite strange that earnings suddenly drop like that.

I'm not sure what's going on, but I can tell the earnings are noticeably down. I mean, I don't even need to take a look at my stats of previous months or compare them to previous years... it's just so obvious that something happened at the end of October.

In the past, October and November have the best months of the year, but this year, it looked fine in the beginning of October, but then something happened at the end of October.

It seems like this hasn't affected everyone, but this certainly has affected me. I don't know if Google is experimenting only with some number of publishers, or if they introduced smart-pricing "2.0" or something like that ... other reasons like bad economy, more competition, euro/dollar exchange rates, ad placement, too many ads, etc. can't just explain the sudden drop like that.

I absolutely love AdSense, but the most frustrating thing is that, when things like this happen, I just don't know why and I need to keep wondering and wondering what's going on. It would be so nice to get at least one word from Google if they did some updating, changed their rules or if they tweaked something, or whatever they did.

Of course, I'm not talking about minor fluctuations, that's very understandable. This is just so obvious to me that Google tweaked something at the end of October, so it would be nice to get even a hint from Google what's going on.

Google is run by the smartest people on earth (no question about that), so I'm quite surprised that they haven't paid much attention to the fact that many publishers find it absolutely frustrating that the only real advice they give to publishers is just to "build quality content". Yes, that's right, I absolutely agree with that 100%, it's all about quality content, and I believe I've been faithfully building quality content for years now. But why the sudden drop now? So, it would so nice to know a little more what's going on... especially if they did some tweaking or applied some new clicks/earnings accounting methods, etc. Otherwise, we are just left here to speculate and wonder.

[edited by: photojack at 10:15 pm (utc) on Nov. 10, 2009]