Forum Moderators: martinibuster
my theory: eCPM drops if you advertise on AdWords (MFA prevention?)
Maybe, but that's not what happened to me. I haven't advertised with AdWords.
I have to say, however, that early Nov has been pretty much the trough of eCPM of the past 3 years. BUT there are some wierd things going on with the graph. It is more like a stock chart than an undulating seasonal chart. I got killed at the beginning of July - peak tourist season and my eCPM went down loads - I guess it could have been due to advertisers being booked up but it sure soesn't look like that the year before.
Anyway, I recommend you have a look at your eCPM for the last couple of years in Excel and then see if anything makes more sense.
Please tell if I am missing something.
One of the truly brilliant aspects of adsense has been precisely that you need not have an ad rep if you don't want to hassle with the whole commission/payment/collection process. Of course one should always diversify, as the subprime greed-schemes should demonstrate to anyone speculating...
Adsense is still brilliant in their position as paid mediator.
What is disturbing is when you see what was previously consistent suddenly change at a certain date without explanation of any kind. We can all accept economic realities, but we should at least be advised as to their nature, since profits go two ways in this process, of course. But then again, it could be a bug. Bugs are known to happen and are often fixed...
Could it be that the Google algo has become more stringent regarding it's definition of what consitutes a valid click?
Could it be that the Google algo has become more stringent regarding it's definition of what consitutes a valid click?
Scurra, this is what I have been thinking as well. I noticed that my metrics (CTR, eCPM, revenue) were really bad in September. Was that an early beta test of the code that later caused what we now know as The Glitch?
Lets take your 20k number here and break it down for you by a yearly basis.
1 employee of any skill level (including taxes both sides of soc and fed and medical) - 90k
Yourself (including taxes both sides of soc and fed and medical) - 90k
Site costs (including security, servers, programming, promotions, payroll, accounting fees) - 60k
Right there you are at your 20k per month level. That has been the strong point to adsense, it allows us to focus on other parts of our business and let google sell our adspace. Could we make more direct, yes but with a great deal of headache. Balancing ad contracts, inventory and such is a pain.
This move makes little sense to me, Google is well aware that we have people knocking at our door for our space. MSN, Yahoo and many others have been calling and emailing me monthly for our adspace.
I guess its just time for us to move on, and yes for us this boils down to one simple truth.
Greed.
Maybe two...
We look at trends in all our ventures. I have tracked a group of B2B sites since the beginning of AS and the trend is down. It's a historical fact, the amount per click we receive is steadilly shrinking over the last two years - now by 70%.
Leverage. Google has far the most leverage in our relationship. There is little or nothing I can do to pressure them. I have little or no influence on the payout - I am talking the raw payout, not how many pages or ad position on pages - the raw payout. I can not persuade or negotiate in any way. I have no input to my worth and desired payout from them.
When is the last time you started a business and said "I will have the customer set the price for the product I am going to sell them".
Sure there is AS money to be made, but the leverage relationship is so one-sided it is more like being an employee of G - Taking and doing orders from the boss rather than being a business owner.
Could it be that the Google algo has become more stringent regarding it's definition of what consitutes a valid click?
Scurra, this is what I have been thinking as well. I noticed that my metrics (CTR, eCPM, revenue) were really bad in September. Was that an early beta test of the code that later caused what we now know as The Glitch?
Explains why I've been registering clicks on my click tracker but they don't turn up in the stats.
...definition of what consitutes a valid click?
Which could be their experiment with a later version of smart pricing.
Several times over the past few years I've been faced with the decision to find a better way to make money, this is another. AdSense may snap back, as in earlier crises, but I just can't see putting more energy into web sites if AdSense just moves the goal posts every time I get close...
Could it be that the Google algo has become more stringent regarding it's definition of what consitutes a valid click?
Since the 20th of October, my sites with primarily non-US/UK visitors have had CTR values of about half of what they have been over the past three years... with the same or better impressions. Those sites that have a predominantly US/UK audience have shown little or no difference in CTR but have seriously reduced eCPM.
Oddly, the sites with seriously diminished CTR are showing unusually high ePC rates which somewhat offsets the diminished CTR producing a "standing still" effect in a season where earnings should be steadily ramping up.
Chapman-
Sure there is AS money to be made, but the leverage relationship is so one-sided it is more like being an employee of G - Taking and doing orders from the boss rather than being a business owner.
Thanks, Jon_King - this is a shrewd observation and indeed a very good point.
I had all but forgotten about this until this morning when it occurred to me that this person may have been testing my attitude about AdSense and may have actually been with Google.
This may be totally off-base but I am wondering if any other victims of "the glitch" got a similar offer...
I just don't see Google suddenly shafting their publishers. It simply does not make good business sense in the long term. Sure, it would increase short term gains, but it woud quickly kill the prgram and in the long term it would result in a loss for Google.
What was her strange parting remark?...KF
More significantly, now that I've dug up the first two emails she sent me I find it rather astonishing that both are dated 10/14/07 and not three weeks earlier as was my first recollection.
Again, it may all be paranoid conspiracy thinking unless it does turn out that she actually did contact others in this group.
I just don't see Google suddenly shafting their publishers. It simply does not make good business sense in the long term. Sure, it would increase short term gains, but it woud quickly kill the prgram and in the long term it would result in a loss for Google.
At $675, Google needs each and every Cent to fulfil the next quarterly earnings expectation. Once they badly miss the expectations, the bubble 2.0 will burst. Google stock will drop like a rock, the tech sector will drop even more, and a number of startup companies will simply vanish. Not that this would matter to Google.
To Google just the next earnings report matters. That's the horizon of Google. They can not afford to think long-term. (Someone somewhere in the Google empire thinks long-term; that's why they possibly think that the participants in the in-efficient Adsense model [which just contributes like 15% to the bottom line] actually can be shafted).
Of course, that's just my $0.02 click.
It's one thing to let one's imagination drift
yet another to start following it
It is difficult to argue with this and even harder to find anything meaningful in it. It seems to be some vague inuendo about speculation. Well let me tell you nothing will be learned here without some speculation and theorizing about what might have happened, that's what we're doing here, that's what the title of the thread says rather directly.
For every theory that works there must be dozens that fail, it's how detective work gets done.
I don't have enough guts to short it, January puts are looking good
I've read many accounts of people "frustrated" with Google in the past years who claimed they were going to short the stock.
You can imagine how "frustrated" they are now. Don't trade emotionally!
I repeat, you cannot possibly think this if you see the striking pattern on the eCPM chart. This is not the behavior of a large group of advertisers absent some major external news event. Large groups simply do not independently behave this way, it absolutely had to be some internal change affecting only some subset of Adsense publishers, otherwise we would not have so many people reporting contrary results.
I agree. The argument that the "glitch" was caused by some sudden course correction by advertisers en masse simply doesn't ring true.
I noticed that my metrics (CTR, eCPM, revenue) were really bad in September. Was that an early beta test of the code that later caused what we now know as The Glitch?
Zett, anything is possible as we do already know that Google constantly tweaks and tests the algos for Adsense and Adwords. One only has to venture over to the Google search forum to see how webmasters constantly complain about how they are affected by new search algo glitches. It's also interesting to note that many changes result in scrapers and duplicate content sites taking top position whilst "legit" sites disappear off the search map, only to mysteriously re appear again later.
What I do know for certain is that over the preceding two years the period of September through to Halloween is usually a period of strong revenue performance. This year however, September started off ok, then all of a sudden it was like someone had turned off a switch and ctr suddenly crashed. Even stranger yet is the fact that my performance in the Serps during this time had remained consistently strong and there seems to be no shortage of the usual advertisers either, to account for a ctr change.
Just a guess.
