Forum Moderators: martinibuster
For the first year my earnings were steadily on an upwards trend. Now, I am getting the highest click-through rate I've ever had, yet for the past 4 months my earnings have steadily declined. The decline is alarming to me.
In my category of site, there are a ton of useless and crappy scaper sites, or sites with little to no useful content. And many of these have adsense in them. Obviously this is diluting the pool for high-quality high-earnings ads.
Pages that I publish on my site typically require significant effort for me to produce because of the quality, yet my competition can just spew garbage and get accepted into the Google Adsense program. (Not all of my competition are bad, but the majority are pretty bad).
Then of course there's the"smart-pricing" which I would have thought would have benefited sites like mine that produce quality content and take time to write reviews, articles and editorials that are original and useful to people interested in the category that my site fits in to. Yet I am seeing the opposite it seems.
All of this is very disheartening to me because I have learned that others in my category who are content scapers or just fodder generators are earning more than I am.
Does anyone think it's worthwhile to contact Google and ask them what's going on? At the rate that things are going this will be the fifth month where my earnings are on a downwards trend.... The effort almost doesn't seem worth it anymore. Why should I pour my heart and soul into a site when the unscrupulous, in-it-for-the-quick-cash types are earning more than I am while my earnings are diminishing?
sr123
<Even those who have Post traumatic stress from the google roller coaster still won't jump ship unless the money is better.>
I think ive really got that!
But theoriosly folks...
On the bright side there is hope that earnings will rebound, that massive testing has been taking place as Xenith posted, and we have been reminded a number of times of how many are experiencing increased earnings as well so even though im inclined to believe the corp Adsense pays noticably less, i think its more a combo of mutiple ads, many new publishers, and the advertisers abusing smart pricing or Google allowing them to.
What do you mean by abusing smart pricing?
I really should have read up on it first, i forgot half what i've read here about it, and then speculation gets mixed with fact and ...
I've been under the impression that advertisers can claim poor conversion and the proof of poor conversion is that visitors dont stay or join or buy. I know there are clicks that may be flighty surfers but i also know sales, and just becasue you want to sell it, doesnt mean someone wants to buy it or join a newsletter what ever.
The pros here could clarify how its determined, and have in other threads, i just feel it is being manipulated or mismanaged.
when they get a big influx of new advertisers
That seems interesting!
I am seeing my worst days since couple of months on May 9th and 10th. There is some new ads also begin to appear at my sites since few days ago. I guess it all supports the new advertiser theory.
Since we have the ability to exclude sites on the Adwords side I've been looking at where my Ads are showing much more closely.
Everyday I'm seeing 5-10 brand new sites in my list. I imagine that there may be 1000's of new adsense sites (or pages) each day, further diluting advertising space. And I'm not looking at every site - only ones that are sending more than x clicks a day. I've already run out of room on my exclusion list.
Other wise when they will have competitors like yahoo and msn many of the frustated publishers will turn to them.
I believe that 'google taking a bigger' cut is likely the least probable scenario.
It is the easy-out answer when things go wrong - like saying it was 'God's will', or in this case 'Google's will'.
I think time has come when google have to rethink about there revenue sharing policy.They are keeping too much for themselves ..i guess much more then 50%.
In Q1 2005, the Google payout to revenue partners averaged 79%.
Other wise when they will have competitors like yahoo and msn many of the frustated publishers will turn to them.
That doesn't necessarily mean Yahoo and MSN will welcome them with open arms.
If you want to do well as a publisher, you should have at least a small budget for buying ads so you understand things from their point of view. Advertisers are the people that Google is most interested in keeping happy. (Publishers should be interested in this too!)
Keeping advertisers happy means giving them a high return on investment (ROI) for their advertising dollar.
When a new advertiser sets up ads, Google suggestion for how much they should bid is way high. This means that as the advertiser tracks ads they will almost always go back and adjust their bids down.
As an advertiser, I find I get the best return from shooting for the 2nd or 3rd highest bid for a particular keyword.
Google provides advertisers with tools to help them maximize their advertising budget which in the short run means minimizing publishers and Google's revenue.
In the long run, we all benefit because when advertisers make money more advertisers pull money from newspaper and other forms of advertising and put it into AdWords.
Remember, many new advertisers and many new publishers enter the market every day. This is bound to cause fluctuations. Google correctly tries to minimize uncertainty for advertisers. This means things are going to vary more for publishers.
