June 2012 AdSense Earnings and Observations

[netmeg]

Have at it!

Slow start to what should be a killer month for me.

[zarathustra2011]

Lot of clicks and good CTR so far today - wondered if it was all those UK Jubilee watchers sitting on their couches with laptops and phones at hand, so I checked the countries in the performance reports and have a really diverse mix, but only 2 from the UK itself - guess they're all off down the pub.

[HuskyPup]

One of my worst-ever days Sunday with both UK and US impressions less than half of avearage and today's looking even worse...I hate holidays and even more so a double holiday!

[netmeg]

Is a double holiday two holidays in a row, or two holidays on the same day?

[JCKline]

Sunday was OK, but today is slow, even though the last two days CTR is way up, mainly on video since I enabled the streaming ads in the beginning of my videos. The only problem is CPC has dropped hugely.

[Play_Bach]

Dead all day.

[netmeg]

Yep, pretty slow. Traffic is really good though, so I'm hoping it's just a stats delay.

[MrSavage]

Astonishing is about the only word I can come up with. Not in the good way. Everything is in the soup that makes up Adsense earnings such as "free traffic", but I've adjusted my mindset that things aren't changing over the next while. I don't know if my smart pricing got butchered lately or what the explanation is. It's not just a drop in free traffic. My check last month is about 50% to 60% of what an average month would be. I've given up on click dumps or corrections at this point. Things were the best ever for my Dec 2012. Incredible how hard work and content can be so counter productive. I'm not delusional anymore. If I spend and hour a day learning to play guitar nobody can take that away. That's the lesson. I'm about to close the chapter on this part of my internet life. It's like building an igloo in a freezer in LA and then taking it outside to live in. That's how it can be if you're not smart about this game. Aside from that everything is great! Just not glossing over my earnings. When you turn back the page to 3+ years ago that's a tad disheartening.

So my report today is snafu. Crawling today would be an understatement.

[andrewshim]

MrSavage : I'm not delusional anymore. If I spend and hour a day learning to play guitar nobody can take that away. That's the lesson. I'm about to close the chapter on this part of my internet life.

Can surely understand that. Panda (or was it Penguin or Pangolin or whatever) killed me. 6 years of work got sh*tted down to page 700++. On the other hand... it's also ended 6 years of fear that it might one day end. The niche I was in was a killer competitively anyway. The pennies still trickle in... but I've decided to change my focus. Gone back to my first love - designing. Am now focused on building my tshirt store(s) which I left because I was struck with Adsense fever. Long-term goal is not so much to build a major income stream anymore, but to build a (hopefully) massive catalogue of artwork that I can pass on to my daughter who has taken after her old man in the creative art department.

More time to play bass and guitar these days, make pretend I'm playing with Nathan East / Eric Clapton free from the ball and chain called Adsense.

[MrSavage]

I think a lot of times fellow publishers disregard statements like "my earning are down 50%" or similar. It's easy to skim over those comments when they are just simply text on a forum. So in a way I wish people would pause and consider that comments about being discouraged are not just forum banter. This is real stuff and for some people Adsense was a real source of income which dried up rather quickly and without any real cause. Yes the gods controlling the rains decided to flood the fields and kill the crops. Oh well. I don't control the weather.

I checked my earning daily, many times a day for years. I know my earnings. I know that today for example, my mid afternoon earnings I would have six month ago, made by the time I finished eating breakfast. So yesterday I made a bit more than the day before but it about 50% less than what I would consider average.

This month as I'm currently averaging will be about 50% of what I would normally expect to make. The misleading aspect of posting earnings details is that it's a soup. It's like a perfect storm. Google algo updates seeing free traffic dip, clicks being more scrutinized and ads not being relevant to my site content but rather based on where that person has been before coming to my site.

I'll be happy to post good news when I have some to share. Aside from that things are absolutely fantastic! So with all the new variables which are affecting my earnings, I suppose the 50% drop is the new norm, which means that I need to start reporting here that earnings are right where they should be today...

[edinburgher]

This month as I'm currently averaging will be about 50% of what I would normally expect to make.

That's about how May ended up for me, June has started the same. To be fair, June through August are always low months for me - but not *this* low.

So I'm another rat looking to leave the good ship Adsense before she sinks completely. Unfortunately it'll be a good few months yet before I'm in a position to do so.

I'm sure Google won't miss my meagre 10k impressions per day. But if enough other webmasters also drop out maybe eventually they'll take notice.

[Play_Bach]

Yesterday never recovered. Again. :-(
Earnings barely 25% of average.

[jinxed]

Way way up - I just hope this can continue!

[breeks]

My new norm is 50% less than the same time last year.

[HuskyPup]

Is a double holiday two holidays in a row, or two holidays on the same day?

Two consecutive days. Monday was our traditional Whit holiday moved forward a week to coincide with the Queens Diamond Jubilee celebrations with today, Tuesday, being declared a public holiday.

CTR even further down with earnings now averaging 25% of just a year ago.

I'm about to close the chapter on this part of my internet life.

I can understand that and if my earnings were totally dependent on AdSense I would have jumped ship ages ago however my B&M business is tightly woven into promoting via the Net but we are changing our strategy our of necessity because of scrapers now ranking above us and taking a considerable volume of traffic.

If this means going back to more traditional marketing methods, so be it, it's not us who've screwed-up, it's Google's bloody zoo full of nincompoops.

[zeus]

example of a banner today, has been cut 2 times already was at 3$, now 0.14$
AdSense for Content
pageviews 560
clicks 11
ctr 1.96%
CPC €0.01
Page RPM €0.25
Estimated earnings €0.14

[NomadMan]

Great start of june - then 4th & 5th day downhill in clicks and CPC.

Adsense complexity has grown beyond control - would NOT be surprised at ALL if there's the same confusion in the Adsense control room.

The multi-dimensional tweaks of the past year has shaken the system into continuous instability & oscillations.

Of course not for premium publishers - they run good & ole pre-2011 adsense.

[netmeg]

Last couple days the stats have been very slow to update for me during the day and then I wake up the next morning and there's been a sizable update overnight. Since my traffic is mostly in my own time zone, I'm assuming it's just a delay.

[zarathustra2011]

Hope there is a delay - lowest number of clicks I can remember in a long, long time.

[Play_Bach]

Low clicks, but already have beat earnings for all day yesterday (still peanuts, unfortunately)

[edinburgher]

The multi-dimensional tweaks of the past year has shaken the system into continuous instability & oscillations.

I reckon that's a good diagnosis. Each individual tweak probably makes sense in isolation but they interact in unpredictable ways. Adsense today is chaos theory in action.

A well known example of this is the double pendulum. Adsense has many, many pendulums... and our earnings are at the end of the last one.

There are examples of the effect on Youtube, here's a good one I found. Mods please delete link if not allowed:
[youtube.com ]

[Play_Bach]

Yesterday earnings closed back up to 50% of average. Crazy.

[frankbomarito]

Adwords has been offering $100 freebies to holders who have stopped advertising(my self included).

I find my Adsense earnings increase when this occurs as advertisers spend their bonuses.

[zarathustra2011]

EPC explosion today, with a good number of clicks to boot. Don't know what's going on, as yesterday was far, far from great.

[Lame_Wolf]

Adwords has been offering $100 freebies to holders who have stopped advertising

They also send them to people who have an Adsense account, but not an Adwords account. I always bin mine.

[netmeg]

Unfortunately the AdWords vouchers only work for new accounts (or accounts that have been long dormant) and the advertisers tend to sheer off once the $100 is spent and they realize they're spending their own money.

[netmeg]

Yea, I'm thinking my stats for yesterday may have been delayed or something, as earnings by 10AM this morning were as much as all of yesterday (on essentially the same traffic patterns) But one of the joys of AdSense - I'll never know, will I? ork ork.

[zarathustra2011]

Similar pattern here Negmeg, so I'm sure you're right.

[HuskyPup]

EPC explosion today

Yay...a fantastically low volume of 01/02/03/04 pence clicks plus a further reduced CTR...methinks my trade in the west is totally kaput!

[furshka]

Traffic a bit higher, CTR a bit higher, and CPC almost double. Overall, the best month ever.

[zarathustra2011]

Sorry to hear it HuskyPup - where are your clicks coming from? Even my clicks from India pay out a little more than that.