April 2013 AdSense Earnings and Observations

The rollercoaster ride continues

[JCKline]

I'm hoping April brings more than flowers, as March ended pretty poorly on my end. What's to come...

[netmeg]

You signed up for the product they were offering. They aren't offering a product that gives publishers control; they never have. The deal is, they sell the ads, you place the code. They have no need or interest in offering a different product to publishers. It's not supposed to be a bid/ask marketplace for publishers. They don't think of themselves as an "ad agent" for you. You are not the customer or the partner.

I realize that people want to vent because they get frustrated with Google, I get frustrated too. But I see it for what it is. It's not even worth getting angry about. It's purely a business decision. Nobody's forcing us to use AdSense; to accept the 'deal with the devil'. If I want to make more money, I have to do more of the work by selling my own ad placements (and I am). Individually, our class A websites aren't worth a rat's furry behind to Google, and they don't care if we remove AdSense because there's ten more sites to replace each and every one of ours.

[zork]

As I said before, Google needs its publishers to sustain their business model, which revolves mostly around selling ad space. This is very evident by the fact that their adsense banning has slowed down and they don't allow existing publishers to block more than 50 categories of ads (which is even more to my earlier point regarding them making it difficult to avoid getting smart priced).

Google is a shady company.

[ember]

Problem is.... there is this middleman monopoly guy I have to work through.

You don't have to work through the middleman. You can approach advertisers on your own and keep all the money. I was doing that before Adsense. It was a heck of a lot of work. I'll gladly take Adsense any day and be grateful for it.

[jmorgan]

Drop in traffic/earnings. Was expecting a pickup after Easter but not to be. Anything else going on globally that's affecting this?

[Play_Bach]

Never recovered.

[matrix_jan]

Anything else going on globally that's affecting this?

Spring break.

[Chapman]

@zork, netmeg, jost

Thanks for your thought provoking posts - nice to read what swirls around in my head.

However, as much as I want the AdSense business model to be what zork and jost are presenting... I know it's a "deal with the devil" as Meg so cleverly phrased it.

Just having revisited the brilliantly crafted AdSense Terms and Conditions truly does reinforce just what the deal is: #8 No Guarantee (and implied, no obligations).

Another AdSense day and a bit like pets, appreciation is whatever shows up in the bowl.

[netmeg]

Traffic ratched up on April 1, earnings ahead of schedule too. Got one site that's problematic tho; I had to kind of abandon it a while when I ran out of time and it's lost a lot of traffic.

[Afrosense]

Anything else going on globally that's affecting this?

May be, I think its North Korea threats against U.S

[JCKline]

My first sticky! Yea...o.k., the novelty has worn off.

Yesterday ended as what used to be "normal". Today is very dead so far. Stuck/delayed perhaps. Tomorrow will tell.

[Chapman]

I've done as much as yesterday in the first half of today - best opening morning since 3/7.

As encouraging as it is, I'm holding back on optimism.

[jmorgan]

@matrix_jan Isn't spring break just about over?

[zork]

For anyone who might be interested, I see an increase in earnings today. The up and down adjusting of earnings that was causing losses earlier this week seem to be slowing down. My traffic is about the same today as it was the rest of the week, so I am left to believe the earnings increase is due to my removal of ads from low performing pages. Hope this helps others!

[Powdork]

"I've done as much as yesterday in the first half of today - best opening morning since 3/7.

As encouraging as it is, I'm holding back on optimism. "

exactly. when i woke at 6:30 this morning it was already my highest day this year. then it crept higher before DROPPING by 20%. Still it can fluctuate all it wants if this keeps up.

[Play_Bach]

@orks

You guys must be on different servers. Dead here (SF Bay Area, USA).

[Play_Bach]

Never recovered. :-(

[zork]

Could be your niche?

[jinxed]

Seems stuck since yesterday for me, but who knows

[jost]

Im personally tired of this "you agreed to their terms" BS.

You do realize this is exactly what happened with the robber barons that controlled everything right?

Huge monopolies like google control nearly everything, the traffic and AD's on the internet so they can offer absolute crap deals and abusive contracts to people and take their money.

Then people use the excuse "well you agreed to it!".


Why is it that google was able to screw us by cutting all of our image traffic by taking our images, using it on their image search pages and stealing our bandwidth in the USA but got stopped dead cold in Germany? You know, where peoples rights are actually protected instead of abused by huge corporations?

Its not as simple as "you agreed to it" when you are effectively coerced due to no other real options in a market dominated by a monopoly.

[jpch]

Month is starting out good after March ended well. Looking forward to a strong 2nd quarter with Mother's Day and Father's Day holiday shopping. Assuming of course the U.S. consumer spending doesn't completely tank.

[ember]

Its not as simple as "you agreed to it" when you are effectively coerced due to no other real options in a market dominated by a monopoly.

Go find your own advertisers! Put together an advertising page/packet and approach potential advertisers in your niche. Offer them a deal which is a little more than what you are currently paid per click. You make a little more to compensate for your time, and they pay less than through Adwords because the middle man is gone. Many advertisers will not bother with you, but some will because many advertisers hate Adwords.

[netmeg]

Its not as simple as "you agreed to it" when you are effectively coerced due to no other real options in a market dominated by a monopoly.

Yea, it is. But if you think that's the situation, then this is as far as you will ever go.

[Chapman]

There is no doubt that the AdSense "open loop" terms and conditions were much easier to accept 8-10 years ago. AdSense was brand shiny new then, relatively simplistic in its design, it worked as we expected it to and, more importantly... it worked the way we wanted it to.

Here now in 2013, as netmeg said in an earlier post, "The entire system is a lot more complicated than it used to be". It's a lot more complicated now primarily due to the ever increasing addition of sites that serve little purpose other than to display ads and/or abuse/scam the program.

Allowing "fringe" sites, after the intial introduction, vastly enlarged the Google advertising network overall but also mandated an enhanced marshaling system. That marshaling procedure we typically refer to as the "algorithm" which is an imperfect, ever growing cyber life form that feeds on not much more than data and statistics. If you have a niche that has similar statistics to the sites it's trying to marshal... you get marshaled too.

The AdSense to publisher relationship is an anomaly, almost completely without precedence and defying traditional business definition. That's exactly what Google intended when it created it and that's precisely what all of us signed up to be a part of.

[Play_Bach]

Just past noon here, dead. :-(

[JCKline]

Dead here to, and yesterday never recovered.

[breeks]

Well on my way to best day of the year, which is only about a third of my best day ever. Not complaining though :)

[Powdork]

Earnings are down today, but everything is reporting as normal compared to the last 8 days.

[karkadan]

A regular start today; then it became slow; another bad day.

[Play_Bach]

Something is seriously going haywire in my account this month. I get two of the highest click count days in nearly two years on April 1st and 3rd, click counts about half those on the 2nd and 4th, and then completely dead today. Sure AdSense, whatever you say. :-|

[edinburgher]

The AdSense to publisher relationship is an anomaly, almost completely without precedence and defying traditional business definition. That's exactly what Google intended when it created it and that's precisely what all of us signed up to be a part of.

Agreed. And I signed up to it because I trusted Google; I no longer do.

Not because I think they're ripping us of. They don't need to do that. It's their systems I no longer trust.

Originally Adsense was simple and comprehensible. I could be sure that the system treated me reasonably and fairly. For better or worse.

Now the whole thing is so complex that I think it's mathematically unstable. All the factors interacting produce a chaotic system where small publishers are at the mercy of waves of revenue fluctuation. But that doesn't matter to Google as long as their total revenue is rising.

This is no longer the system I signed up for.

So why am I still here? Because I'm in the UK and the cost of handling US$ payments makes dealing with advertisers directly prohibitive. But I've already stripped Adsense off lots of pages and expect to remove it from many more if things go on this way.