Forum Moderators: martinibuster
What I have noticed is in past 1 year is the traffic to my websites have increased but my adsense payments have dropped from 500 USD to 100 USD approximately. Am I doing anything wrong Or I am missing on something critical as per Adsense placement on websites is concern?
You can expect comments about smart pricing but don’t believe it! Google's stock is very high and they need to keep it that way for some time. Enough said
It could be a simple matter of supply and demand (too many publishers in your niche chasing the same finite pool of ads).
Or it could be both.
In three years my traffic increased by 100% and my AS incomings went down by 60%.
Let’s name this club…
I’m also Adwords user and know that the market and prices are still there.
We need to share ideas that go beyond obvious details. When this kind of topic appears in this forum, suddenly is full of comments that do not help us.
The problem is how we can get decent revenue from our assets according to the market, niche, ad position, ad format, seasonal, channel use, and smart pricing systems.
AS changed in these years, the market is bigger; there must be things that we can do with our content sites, especially if we has been improving them constantly.
In one of my site I begun a test with several options to AS, next month I’ll share the results.
Ok friends, what it will be the name of this club?
Regards,
wgonz
It is smartprice, I am sure. Google sure is smart about its pricing. I'll be switching to CPM to see if it works better for me soon. I'd suggest you to try out other networks to see how it goes.
[edited by: Raymond at 1:58 pm (utc) on April 7, 2007]
Google made some dirty changes to their system. To avoid smart pricing I’ve started to put border and it made matters worse.
Mine went from $1500 to $100
Too much ad space available on MFA sites + not being able to use adwords (much) to bring customers.
Too bad.. that is quite a big hit
I hope someone here able to provide some guideline to improve situation. I’ve only 2 - 350x250 box per page. There was a time last year when I use to get $220-250 each day. Next I thought I will touch $300..$400..$500 per/day and so on.
My traffic and CTR increased but overall earning is dropping each day :(
Competition.
There is no real/comparable competition for AdSense. The poster created the competition by selling ads direct.
This will continue until YPN, MSN or somebody gives AdSense a run for the money.
FarmBoy
Now the biggest and best known sites are getting the best and highest-paying ads. Sites that are not well-known are getting the lower-paying advertisers.
the biggest and best known sites are getting the best and highest-paying ads
I dont think they get better ads. I guess they just get better portion from the click pay. When you want to use AdWords to bid on keywords that are displayed on my website the minimum is about $0.50 per click and that will not get you much. From what I know from my advertisers the CPC is more about $1/click. So how it is possible that I do get on average $0.07 per click from the very same advertisers?
Please dont blame it on Smart Pricing because I have very targeted quality traffic for my niche. If my website was garbage why would I get so many site targeted ads? Unfortunately these targeted ads are paying even less. We all know that Google pays about 70% to its publishers but my guess would be that premium advertisers get even higher cut and because they do distribute most of the ads our cut can be even less than 20% and Google’s quarterly financial reports will still be showing about 70% share for advertisers. Go figure.
I'm only down by about 25%, but I've been improving my site, adding new content, getting new visitors and generally doing all the right things that should have increased my revenue by maybe 50%.
Adsense EPC is dropping, so you have to run harder and harder just to stay in the same place.
Over the same time period however, my affiliate sales have gone up, so my work on the site has been worthwhile.
I anticipate Adsense numbers will keep falling, but they are still better than I get with Yahoo, so I won't be removing it anytime soon. I will be doing more affiliate advertising though.
It could be "smart pricing."It could be a simple matter of supply and demand (too many publishers in your niche chasing the same finite pool of ads).
Or it could be both.
Or it could be Google's constant adjustment on the Adwords side of things which makes CPC increasingly cheaper for advertisers. Or it could also be the fact that there are more parked domain/MFAs out there than every before.
Or it could also be the fact that there are more parked domain/MFAs out there than every before.
That's almost certainly a factor. That, and the explosion of computer-generated, keyword-driven pages from both mom-and-pop spammers and corporate-owned megasites.
Again, it'll be interesting to watch what happens as Google rolls out site-targeted contextual ads.
I have no love for Google or large multi-national corporations in general. I've recently rediscovered the joys of selling advertising and I'd be happy to discuss any ideas along the lines of organizing as a group to share resources, revenues, buy, sell, distribute ads, etc.
Interested parties should sticky me as I already have some ideas and concepts that work.
Google's not going to get any better. In fact, it's likely to get worse as the number of publishers in their network grows exponentially without any form of control on their part. It's obvious that the entry bar is quite low for publishers, and some of those publishers just proliferate into more and more MFA style sites.
If Google cared about customer retention more than they do profits, they would have initiated controls long ago. They haven't. They won't, and eventually, like every other overvalued tech stock, their value will deteriorate. That's little solace for those of us who went with the program in the belief that we would be treated fairly.
Before EFV or anybody else comes along and attacks the content of this post, I reiterate the one metric that Google and/or their algo has missed: more quality content and traffic should yield better results, not worse. I no longer consider AS a long-term solution and I'm actually happy I was never too successful with it because removing it and replacing it with my own ads will not be very painful. The process will probably take me a couple of years, but it will be worth it in the long run.
Bottom line, from an old Gospel tune, "God bless the child that's got his own."
Before EFV or anybody else comes along and attacks the content of this post, I reiterate the one metric that Google and/or their algo has missed: more quality content and traffic should yield better results, not worse.
It isn't that simple. With a contextual advertising medium like AdSense, "quality content" is useful only if it attracts an audience of buyers. And more traffic can't be expected to yield better results if there's a finite pool of advertising clicks available to the publisher.
In the end, it comes down to supply and demand.
The only defense is to leave and find another network that pays better. Waiting around and getting upset will only lead to further depletions in monthly earnings.
In the end, it comes down to supply and demand
I agree! The demand part is working fine because there is a demand for our ad space & clicks. That’s why Google puts ads on our websites and is collecting funds from advertisers for clicks we have delivered and ads we have displayed on our websites. Isn’t it? Unfortunately we are suppliers with no rights.
The worst part about it is the arrogant way of doing business with us. There is no communication between Google and publishers. Why? Because Google knows best what is the best for us!? Google knows exactly what ads to put on our websites and how much we should get paid for it.
We just have to shut up or leave.
OK now here is something else I came across this week on Marcus Frind's blog and haven't seen it here on WebmasterWorld. Valleywag posted the audio from a conference call from Federated Media this past week. There was some very telling info on that call. I believe it was John Battelle mentioning this. He wanted the deal for FM that the New York Times and other big publishers get rather than what independent publishers get. They worked for months to get the deal and they finally did. Then he explained what GOOG pays independent publishers. Now this is what they figured, not me. This is all in the call so go listen yourself.
GOOG takes 15% off the top as an adserving fee. That leaves 85%. Then GOOG pays more than 50% of the remaining amount to publishers. This works out to a minimum of 42.5% or roughly 43% as they discussed it. This is apparently the AVERAGE payout for independent publishers. I thought this was pretty amazing info, but quite believable in my opinion. So I'm sure lots of publishers average less than 43%. So Google is taking 57% of the gross with small publishers.
Here is one other thing I also notice. I think in general that eCPM rates are increasing for the internet in general and it seems that many of us are getting a smaller and smaller share from GOOG. If you have quality sites, you might want to check out some other Ad networks. FM posts all the rates for the high quality sites in their network. Many sites are selling CPM ads in the $25-35 range. I don't know how much most of you guys get from adsense, but I doubt it's anywhere near that for most publishers. Obviously FM takes a cut, but they look much more transparent and I doubt it's anything close to what Adsense takes.
I would like to hear what people in this thread think of this.
Publishers are a dime a dozen and will always be easier to attract than advertisers.
Uh... That wasn't the case seven years ago.
ok, back to whining.
I think in general that eCPM rates are increasing for the internet in general and it seems that many of us are getting a smaller and smaller share from GOOG.
A smaller share, or just less money? It's probably the latter--again, because of supply and demand.
Other types of advertising do pay better than AdSense does in some cases, but that's hardly surprising, since (for example) a major advertiser that's buying display ads on a handpicked site knows what it's getting in terms of editorial context and audience. In contrast to that, buying keyword-targeted run-of-network ads on the Google "content network" is buying a pig in a poke, although that will begin to change when Google fully implements site-targeted contextual ads.
It’s not about regular roller coast stats.
I feel very happy for those colleagues that are doing well with AS. Many of us have living such good AS times for several years.
Returning to the subject…I remember in the summer 2003 that happy adsensers wonder if the model would have an end…if there would be any kind of saturation…it was hard to answer that at that time.
The internet advertising is still growing. G changes its standards, lower quality and more profits.
It’s still a great opportunity to many sites, vendors, and everything between them.
But I beguine to think that we need a new network or model based on the content quality.
In 2003 the contextual text advertising emerged from a lot of blinking and jumping monkeys.
May be now, it’s time that something emerges from 1 cent MFA networks.
The internet advertising is still growing. G changes its standards, lower quality and more profits.
I don't think Google has changed the standards of the "content network," because those standards weren't high to begin with. Low admission standards were necessary for Google to achieve a dominant market share.
But I beguine to think that we need a new network or model based on the content quality.
Google is already working on that with site-targeted CPM ads, site-targeted contextual ads (recently announced), and CPA ads (being tested).
Also, there are display-ad networks and rep firms that serve specific niches and work only with handpicked sites, but that's a topic for another day and another forum.
Finally, it's important to remember that "content quality" is only one factor in a site's value to advertisers. "Audience quality" is at least as important--and probably more so. That's why FORBES and THE WALL STREET JOURNAL can charge higher CPMs than THE NATIONAL ENQUIRER and the PODUNK PRESS do.
Many sites are selling CPM ads in the $25-35 range. I don't know how much most of you guys get from adsense, but I doubt it's anywhere near that for most publishers.
I would like to get $25-35/M/page, but actually could make a very good living on $15-20. Google somehow believes they're doing a satisfactory job (actually, maybe they know they're short-changing us) with me at around $3/1000.
I don't believe G will ever produce anything much more than that, and they'd have to pretty much triple my eCPM to get my attention.
If those figures you've quoted are correct, G is taking a much larger share than they're worth. They're the middleman, but they're taking close to what would be considered a fair share for a publisher.
G should get no more than 20% of ad revenue from my site. Anything more than that, well, I'm working for them.
