darkmage - 2:40 am on Nov 14, 2004 (gmt 0)

Well, no. The thing about the four points above is that they are very real. You can see and test each one. The idea that Google puts on a cap is a theory that has no direct evidence - in fact, it barely deserves to be called a theory. It is just one of those crappy one-line explanations - people are looking for a lazy, simple reason where they can focus blame. Why accept a theory with no evidence when there are other factors that you can see?

Besides it doesn't make sense for Google to have such a cap policy. If Google caps your income, they are also capping their own. Why do this for rises in genuine traffic?

Plus there is a very obvious flaw in the logic. Many sites start off with a few thousand impressions a week, just to test Adsense. They then add AS to more pages over time all the way up hundreds of thousands or more. Guess what, their income also goes up by a substantial amount.

If you are so convinced of this cap, then turn off most of your adsense pages (or don't add adsense to new pages), replace AS with standard ads like fastclick. Since Adsense income is supposed to stay the same, you'll be ahead.