Drop in revenue

[ca3le]

I've been making my money off AdSense since before it was really released. But recently I had a pretty major database crash on my largest site. So while I was fixing it I've actually been improving the site, for instance I was running SMF for my forums and have since changed that to IP.Board.

The site is looking better than ever but my revenue has gone down and my traffic has taken a hit. Funny thing is that the CPM is down on all my content not just the pages that were effected by the crash.

Can it at all have to do with Googles Indexing of those changed pages... could that at all effect the ads on other pages?

[Lame_Wolf]

Can it at all have to do with Googles Indexing of those changed pages... could that at all effect the ads on other pages?

The Adsense Bot has nothing to do with the normal Bot that comes round and caches pages.

I can make a page, and instantly have related adverts, yet may not be cached for weeks.

[tangor]

Did the URLs change during the update? Might not look like the original site. Changing forum software might make it look different.

[ca3le]

Yeah, the board changed url. But I'm using mod_rewrite with 301 redirects -- but it is a huge change... 90% of my content, about 30K topics not to mention all the related urls changed address. Today my CPM jumped about $2. So maybe I just need to ride it out for a while.

[Swanny007]

Changing 30K+ URLs is probably the reason. I'm sure AdSense is familiar with each page based on the URL and they changed so it has to re-evaluate each page in it's new location. I'm thinking you just need to wait a week or two for the AS bot to figure things out and get some performance history on the new URLs.

[kodox]

March rev is so stupidly low.....

[martinibuster]

May or not be applicable. Did your channels change?

[cyclinder]

i have a rev crash 50% since April start for the major site.

nothing was changed. the traffic is also on the same level.

[BedSupperclub]

same drop here cyclinder!

[norbiu]

Same drop as cyclinder. April has been the worst loss I've seen in 5 years. No traffic changes.

[martinibuster]

i have a rev crash 50% since April start for the major site.

What's that in actual dollars? Most people experiencing drops that dramatic are discussing amounts in the five to twenty dollar per day range. Percentages in those situations are not accurate as a metric because the smaller amounts typically involved are exagerrated when expressed as a percentage.

There are two reasons why publishers experience 50% drops. The first one is the dollar amounts are low. So it's easy to drop from $20 per day to $10 per day. The second reason has nothing to do with AdSense, it has to do with traffic.

Getting back to the original post:

my revenue has gone down and my traffic has taken a hit.

I think it is fair to say there is a connection between lower traffic and lower income. That's not an AdSense issue, it's a traffic issue.

[JasonDX]

i have a rev crash 50% since April start for the major site.

Welcome to the adsense revenue crash club. One of the fastest growing internet clubs.

[JasonDX]

There are two reasons why publishers experience 50% drops. The first one is the dollar amounts are low. So it's easy to drop from $20 per day to $10 per day.

Why is it easier to drop from $20 to $10 than from $1000 to $500? 50% is 50% no matter how you look at it.

[Lame_Wolf]

Why is it easier to drop from $20 to $10 than from $1000 to $500? 50% is 50% no matter how you look at it.

I thought it was pretty obvious why.
Someone who loses $10 when they are earning $1000 a day is a piss in the ocean.
But someone who earns $20 a day and loses $10 is a big deal. That is why percentages mean little when earnings are on the low end of the scale.

[JasonDX]

I thought it was pretty obvious why.
Someone who loses $10 when they are earning $1000 a day is a piss in the ocean.
But someone who earns $20 a day and loses $10 is a big deal. That is why percentages mean little when earnings are on the low end of the scale.

Hah? Run that by me again. How is $10 from $1000 50%? What he was saying was that it's easier to lose $10 from $20 per day than it is $500 from $1000. Either way it's 50% and both hurt. The question I had is why is it easier to drop 50% from $20/day than it is to trop 50% from $1000/day.

[Lapizuli]

It's a matter of statistical accuracy. Assuming that significantly greater revenue means more content and longevity (a fair assumption in most cases), Websites bringing in $1000 a day will tend to have a lower standard deviation - i.e., variation from the average - than those bringing in $20 a day. An extreme change in the $1000 income will have more statistical significance.

Statistical significance is an indicator of how useful data is for noticing trends.

A sufficient sample size is important if you're going to point to a trend that is "real" - i.e., predictive. The greater the sample size, the more your results approach consistency, all other things being equal. Nicely consistent data based on a large sample size suggests that that all the random factors that go into bringing about variations in earnings average out. Those fluctuations may be important on one level, but they are "consistently variable," so to speak.

So if, say, for three years you've been bringing in $1000 a day, plus or minus $50, you have some useful data to work with. When you're suddenly earning $800 daily for a week, you're more likely to be noticing evidence of a real change in the system than a website that earns only $20 per day seeing a $10 loss, even though you only noticed a 20% drop and they noticed a $50% drop. The smaller website's variations can be looked at as a statistical artifact of having a low sample size.

People are designed to notice patterns, so we tend to see meaning in numbers that are often not statistically meaningful. Meaningful in other ways :) but not statistically.

And all that said...statistical significance can be seen as a relative thing, too. I step on one bug, which has no statistically significant affect on the bug population, but was very significant for that bug.

When Google AdSense changes its earnings algorithm, the data may show overall no notable change in revenue, and so in Google's eyes, what they did wasn't a big deal. But some individual publishers, large and small, will be wiped out and others will get rich. For those small businesses, the change caused statistically significant variations.

[Lame_Wolf]

Hah? Run that by me again. How is $10 from $1000 50%?

Hah, to you too.

I was on about losing $10 NOT percentages.

Correct, $10 from $1000 isn't 50%. But I never said it was.

Read Martinibuster's post. I understand what he is saying.

Okay, I earn £2 per day. If I were to get £1 per day - that would be a 50% drop. But that wouldn't hurt me like it would if I were on 10k a day and dropped 50%

Losing £1 a day is a piss in the ocean.
Losing £5k a day is not.
Both are 50% reduced.

Hah </sarcasm>

[martinibuster]

Great post, Lapizuli. :)

[fearlessrick]

Statistics are easily manipulated, plus, Lapizuli's positions are hardly defensible. Even though his arguments sound great, they're full of miscomprehension concerning the efficacy of algorithmic models.

The entire problem with statistical analysis is that humans have been inculcated with misleading data, stemming from imprecise models for decades, leading to many false and possibly damaging beliefs.

A 50% drop in revenue is a relevant event for either the small or large web site, just as half the population catching the flu in Rhode Island would be as statistically important as the same thing happening in California. It's all relative, as Lapizuli noted.

Just because something is bigger doesn't mean that it's more accurate. The $1000 a day earner could be getting 2/3rds of the revenue from a handful of pages which were damaged by an algo change, whereas the smaller site could just as easily be a very smooth performer with plenty of hits from a variety of sources. In this instance, the revenue drop would be more of an aberration from the large site, not the small one.

The argument would make more sense if one said small websites dealing with X or Y versus large websites on the same topic. Then, you'd be comparing apples to apples. All other comparisons are generally "noise."

All of this argument about random fluctuations is really a waste of time, since G isn't telling us anything and most of us know these happen all the time. A more telling occurrence would be a "Black Swan" event, as described by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

That's really what will determine our fates; that, and socionomics. The rest is just fluff.

[JasonDX]

I read and understood Martinibuster's post. Although I don't agree with everything he said there may be some truth in it. Your post has nothing in common with Martinbuster's. You said, "Someone who loses $10 when they are earning $1000 a day is a piss in the ocean. But someone who earns $20 a day and loses $10 is a big deal." Who cares about $10. It's completely irrelevant.

The way you tried to answer my question you're implying that $10 from $1000 is 50%. The whole point of the post was to understand why it's easier to drop 50% in earnings, not $10 in earnings, as someone posted earlier, when you're used to earning $20/day as oppossed to dropping 50% when you're earning $1000/day. We all know that $10 from $1000 is almost nothing. That's irrelavent.

[edited by: JasonDX at 9:02 pm (utc) on Apr 9, 2010]

[Freedom]

For the last 2 months, a majority of the publishers, including old timers, are reporting:

1. Massive drop in revenue epc/ecpm
2. Problems getting pages indexed
3. Excessive amount of public service ads

I've been with adsense for almost 7 years now and have never seen it this bad, or this many people affected. I don't want to be one for exagerated hyperbole, or to say the sky is falling, but I will say where there is smoke there is fire and smoke is coming out of the adsense house.

[JasonDX]

Statistics are easily manipulated, plus, Lapizuli's positions are hardly defensible. Even though his arguments sound great, they're full of miscomprehension concerning the efficacy of algorithmic models.

He makes assumptions that aren't always accurate. For example, I have an established site since 2003 with high traffic that earns about $20/day. If a site only earns $20/day it doesn't mean that it is new, has low traffic, and no longevity.

[edited by: JasonDX at 9:08 pm (utc) on Apr 9, 2010]

[DeVille]

Yeah worst its ever been for me too

[jmccormac]

It looks like the people in Adsense have banjaxed something again. Today's stats are a wipeout.

Regards...jmcc

[Lapizuli]

Great post, Lapizuli.

Thank you!

Just because something is bigger doesn't mean that it's more accurate.

Yes, I agree. And sorry, yes, statistics are a complex science and my example is woefully simplified.

But I still maintain that with greater sample quantity comes greater statistical usefulness. Note that I say usefulness, because in my book it's well nigh meaningless to say "accurate," since it's far trickier to measure accuracy than usefulness. If we could easily test accuracy, we'd just go ahead and be accurate, instead of take statistics. I mean, if we could go to Google and say, "Did you change the earnings algorithm?" and ask our users "Why did you bounce on the page?" and trust everyone's answers to be factual and such we'd do that and not bother with a lot of data collecting fuss. I think the real benefit of stats analysis is for decision making, and what matters is the outcome. If we make decisions based on less useful data, chances are the results will be more variable and less predictable than if we base it on more useful data. All relative.

Anyway, the "greater quantity" I'm talking about may come from a combination of number of pages, longevity of content, number of visitors, range of content types, range of content quality, how much content can dance the rhumba, or any number of other weird and unexpected dimensions. A good analysis will take as many measurable dimensions as possible into account. It's all a guessing game and the questions asked can shape the answers, and yes, statistical data is not remotely perfect.

But the issue here is comparing statistical relevance for two websites that might differ in ten dimensions (and so be apples and oranges, as fearlessrick points out), or in just one. If all else is equal, I'd base my future actions on stats coming from a website that has more numbers. And since online statistical data is possibly one of the most messed-up, organic, and complex set of data there is, it's rare for all else to be equal. But one hopes some is more equal than others.

I often wonder if people would follow prescribed medical recommendations based on the latest health research study if they realized the study was done on 38 female undergraduate students in a private midwestern college or whatever. The media often doesn't differentiate between that kind of study and one that lasted decades and tracked half of Europe. Both studies have something to teach, but both do not have the exact same predictive value.

He makes assumptions that aren't always accurate.

Heh-heh. I'm not a he. But anyway, that's the thing about assumptions. They're never accurate. They're not meant to be. They're for establishing a common starting point in order to make resultant arguments clear.

And to revert to topic...my stats two days ago sucked for half the day, then caught up to average. My stats yesterday were lovely. Today is awful.

[Freedom]

Today's stats make me want to throw up.

[cyclinder]

Hi guys.

my drop is from 100$ to 50$ from the beginning of April.

[Lame_Wolf]

my drop is from 100$ to 50$ from the beginning of April.

Same thing happened to me last year. Same date. Mine went up to a 75% drop on some days.

[YouTalkingToMe]

Hi Cyclinder,

$100 --> $50
Congratulations! Statistical accuracy qualifies you to cry! :)

[rocco]

For the last 2 months, a majority of the publishers, including old timers, are reporting:

1. Massive drop in revenue epc/ecpm
2. Problems getting pages indexed
3. Excessive amount of public service ads

I've been with adsense for almost 7 years now and have never seen it this bad, or this many people affected. I don't want to be one for exagerated hyperbole, or to say the sky is falling, but I will say where there is smoke there is fire and smoke is coming out of the adsense house.

@Freedom

I am watching this for a month now and I am getting worried. I am noticing a drop on what I am getting paid per click almost by the day but for sure by the day of week. I think about 25% of the revenue was eaten up by this just within a month. And I am not speaking about the statistical phenomenas discussed above.
I have to admit that I did not talk to a google person about this - I rather would like to hear from other publishers on the boards.
It seems like either:
- the inventory of ad slots has grown a lot
- the inventory of ads has imploded
- google takes a larger share

What really is odd is that the ads are matching better than ever before, but they pay less per click.