Forum Moderators: martinibuster
ý56 clicks = 16$ (Last month)ý
ý48 clicks = 2.80$ (today)ý
Then again.. I do have a US partner..
I don't think I can afford Adsense for three more days! This is an emergency. Sometimes you just have to know when its time to bail, and it looks like that time is now. The pages without Chitika will be getting YPN and I'll leave maybe 10% Adsense up just for comparison.
BTW, my average EPC never dropped - only my CTR did. It hit absolute rock bottom (barely registered a percentage) - which took eCPM & earnings down with it.
Is this what you consider a crap site?
My CTR is one quarter of what it is supposed to be.
Instead of getting 100% targeted ads, I am getting ads broadmatched to the correct term. This is, of course, as useful as a chocolate fireguard. It will be some lame attenpt to monetize websites at the low end of the CTR spectrum and its a disaster.
All traffic to purely Adsense pages is about to cease.
That is one huge advantage over free traffic. I can turn paid traffic on and off like a tap.
Imagine all those brains at the 'plex arranging this for the exact week Chitika does channels..
I will as soon as YPN lets Europe join in!
And jumping to Y only solves the diversity issue [Which I will obviously also have to do with Google being as volatile as the earth their HQ is on - Check out the Earthquake soil volatility for Google plex]. I don't really believe that Yahoo will be so much better on the long run. Another big company playing by the same rules .. All we wee webmasters can hope for is a 33%/33%/33% split of power between MS, Yahoo and G on the long run.
a 33%/33%/33% split of power between MS, Yahoo and G
Competition is always good in this marketplace. It'll shake out a lot differently than a 3-way even split, I'll bet. But it's all good! If you're any one of those companies, you will feel enormous pressure to capture more advertisers and publishers than the others. Google clearly holds an advantage at this point because of their nearly 3 year head start, but there's no way I'd sell Yahoo or MS short when it comes to innovation and capitalizing on existing infrastructure and name recognition. In my view, Google's Achilles Heel will be their reliance on AW/AS for nearly all of their revenues. The other two are well diversified and can afford to woo publishers with higher % payouts. That's my prediction - 2 years from now (maybe sooner), Google will be in a much less tenable position than now. Then maybe all this ridiculous stuff the OP and others here are complaining about won't really matter to us. I can't wait for that day!
Swebbie,
My prediction is it'll take about a week :)
Seriously, there is Chitika already, (it outflanked YPN with a worldwide beta) YPN is half there and Microsoft is on the way. I make that a four-way split. I have to wonder what on earth Google thought they were playing at - messing us about like this when they are so vulnerable?
Do they suppose we are too thick to know how to switch the code in an include? I'm already wondering how to do it automatically based on EPM.
Is that about average - 2 to 3 million visitors a month - to get to an Alexa ranking of 300? We were about Alexa 20k with 400k visitors a month.
Just a thought on the rest of this post - I wouldn't rule out that the drops some of you are seeing is simply because advertisers are bidding less per click. I can't see how you can really blame Google for that - they operate the track but they aren't on the horses so to speak.
Bad targeting does.
Another site we own has a alexa of around 23k and only gets around 500k visits a month, as you go into the - 1000 range though it is a completely different ballgame with there algo and gets much more accurate ive found and numbers required to gain scales up bigtime. The 20k-100k range with alexa is much less accurate ive found.
The point I am trying to make though was that not all sites going through this downwards pressure are junk. Our site is 2nd largest authority in its field and I know many of you would know it by name. We are used to the ups and downs with the program but really havent seen such a terrible drop in ctr% since we joined in the late summer of 03.
We will still stay with Adsense for now, they have been good to us and always paid somewhat ontime and in this industry that says alot, we have several other income streams and adopted a business approach much like Yahoos delving into many revenue making programs which is helping us resist these downwards pressures on adverts.
If we learned one thing in 1999/2000 was that advert dollars can disappear in a instant and to base your business off of them is inviting certain doom.
Because the traffic is less targeted. Traffic alone if not really well targeted is completely useless
* I am in a niche that ensures that my traffic is virtually 100% targeted.
* I run an industry recognised, authority site that has been up there for more than four years.
* I have inbound links from most of those that matter in my business.
* My clicks are bringing in much less than half what they were doing a month or more ago.
As far as I can see there is something far wrong here. I appreciate that a lot of people are doing OK but the increasing number of, "What's happened to my earnings?" threads recently suggest that something is going wrong.
In my position I am sure that I could do much better carrying vendor ads. So far I just couldn't be bothered pursuing this but I don't think I can tolerate this particular roller coaster much longer. Google has to realise that it is in a partnership with its advertisers. Its automated methods may be OK for search but what they can do to genuine advertisers (who have a choice) is starting to be both unfair and unacceptable.
Something is definitely wrong here, I am not the first and there are many others seeing this trend. The few that are unaffected hardly makes up for the ones that ARE affected.
Yesterday I had one of my worst days this year. However, three weeks ago I was earning three times more.
The same happened 30 or 40 days ago and it lasted 3 weeks.
I don't know what to expect, last Google updates are making me sick. Definitely, I cannot rely on a stable current of income supplied by Adsense.
There is no logic to this. It has nothing to do with advertiser's budgets or anything like that. They just have not got their system right yet. One way to stabilise this would be to assess ALL Adsense sites, not just the one upon which the advertisers are are approved.
But they won't do that, will they?
I just added a line in my long term plan sheet:
After establishing income from direct advertisers, Google and Chitika.. I added:
- Buy into a business not related to advertising in any way!
Does anyone have a reliable figure on how many AdSense publishers there are?
Could it be a simple matter of supply and demand justifying Google's SP?
Smart pricing a matter of supply and demand? If only that was true...
