Ooh Baby One Last Click

It Never Felt Like This - Revenue Dropout

[ElvisFan]

I have had adsense across 4 sites for 5 years now. During that time my revenue has increased steadily (thanks to the help from members at WW)

However, over the last 6 months my revenue has dropped off steadily and as of today it is down by 50% ... despite adding new content - culling ads from low performing pages - traffic up - placing ads above the fold - and still in the top 10 for 160 keywords across all major SE and unique traffic worldwide.

Causes? Sign of the time? I think not!

It seems to me every time the powers that be add new exotic revenue options such as: third party ads - interested based ads and lick more off the top of my ice-cream cone - I the publisher suffer until they get it right.

Looking at my bottom line today is a joke... I was doing better when things were simply a case of placing the most popular ad size above the fold of content filled pages without all the bells and whistles.

Now I discover that not all ads are not showing above the fold - only after a refresh. (end rant)

So my question is? What do I do about it?

[JasonDX]

I too believe that to be the case. All the new exotic revenue options as you stated are the reason for the revenue drop many publishers are experiencing. More and more publishers are signing up each day and there aren't enough of contexual ads to fill all the inventory therefore Google had to look elsewhere for help. This is where third party, interest based, certified junk networks come in.

I had hoped that they would be a bit more selective when accepting new publishers but that hasn't been the case. Tens of thousand or maybe even hundreds of thousands of new sites are accepted each year. How can cpc rates and fill rates not drop under this scenario? Maybe the "top" best performing publishers are getting most of the better contexual ads and the majority are getting the third party junk ads.