June 2015 AdSense Earnings and Observations

[RedBar]

Here we go again!

[Ebuzz]

@ HymnSite

An RPM of $0.24 is unheard of, I agree. It has to join the ranks of the very lowest earners.

[Ironside]

When you guys talk about rpm, are you talking about page or impression?

[breeks]

Affiliate and direct advertising are out performing Adsense.

Eggs in my basket:
Adsense
Direct advertising
Affiliate advertising
Media dot Net

The Golden Egg (adsense) is not so golden these days :)

[HymnSite]

@Ironside: I refer to Page RPM. Impression RPMs are usually a little bit higher.

[Ironside]

I see, thanks for that. I was going to mention my page rpm. I don't know whether you would consider this to be good or not. I'm not earning much money each day, not as much as I used to. However, the lowest page rpm this month has been 88p, that's $1.03. The highest this month has been £2.22, that's around $3.40. But whether this is considered to be low, average or high, I'm not really sure.

[RyuUK]

You wonder how Adsense can be amazing one day and the next day abysmal.

There is never any middle ground. You expect to see variations, but not crazy highs and lows. It wasn't like this 2 or 3 years ago.

Other than poor targeting and their habit of shovelling those Adwords ads out as much as they can...I don't get it.

[RedBar]

What comes after a total collapse in earnings?

I can tell you, a non-starting day whatsoever, maybe I'll not wait until 30th June to remove all ads, this is now pointless.

[Ironside]

@RyuUK tell me about it, Google AdSenseis so incredibly flaky, you would be a complete fool to rely on it for an income. Mind you, I heard a story about that guy Marcus who started that dating website plenty of fish, apparently he received a AdSense check for something like $2 million and couldn't get the bank to take it.

[Ebuzz]

If you go to Flippa, you'd see all these sites claiming to earn big money with "verified" Adsense stats and if you scrutinize their stats a little deeper, you wonder how in the world can their CTR and RPMs be so high. I mean, seriously...;)

Is Flippa really Scam Central or what?

[RedBar]

Another new record for me!

So far today not one click from either the US or UK...WTH is going on?

Looking at my sites it would appear to be lack of ad inventory, I'm seeing either the same relevant ads on every page or I am seeing totally irrelevant ads everywhere.

The lack of many ads in the regular SERPs suggests to me that my UK industry is not playing at Google's game.

[trebuchet]

Google AdSenseis so incredibly flaky, you would be a complete fool to rely on it for an income.

Ermmm....

Is Flippa really Scam Central or what?

Probably. I know of someone who paid Flippa big $$$ for an Adsense site based on its "verified" earning history. After the transition it got about half the traffic and 20% of the revenue claimed. I'd be doing a ton of due diligence before buying a site from there.

[MrSavage]

I'm quite happy with today. I'll take it, and a few more would be nice.

[Ebuzz]

Probably. I know of someone who paid Flippa big $$$ for an Adsense site based on its "verified" earning history. After the transition it got about half the traffic and 20% of the revenue claimed. I'd be doing a ton of due diligence before buying a site from there.

I wouldn't touch Flippa with a 20 foot pole. Not even a 30 foot pole.

I'd say 99% of the "hot/popular" sites I've seen selling there are just plain dubious at best. They are all showing unreal page RPMs of what I estimate to be $10-20+ at least. It's not one site, it's ALL of them. There was a time when you could actually find "real" sites with real earnings (I don't just mean Flippa but on the internet), but that was at least 5 years ago. I myself actually bought a few small ones and turned a profit on some of them. Today, no more......

The good sites are not being sold (everyone would want to hang on to them), so what's left are those disposable ones, where it would be dangerous to buy them, not just for your wallet, but for your Adsense account.

[Carleenp]

I buy on Flippa and have had some good success buying earning sites on there with a high ROI. But it requires a lot of due diligence and patience. In the niches I prefer about 90% of the items on there are crap. The sellers tend to make low quality sites with ads placed in ways that lead to a poor user experience, but that will initially at least bring in high CTRs. They try to ramp up traffic and income and sell before Google figures it out and dumps them back down in the rankings or deindexes the site altogether. But quality sites and under optimized sites with decent content do exist on there and can be good investments, especially if you know the niche and are able to better monetize them than they were set up with to begin with.

[RedBar]

Flat_____Lining_____AdSense_____Has_____Died

[jbayabas]

I just run Vertoz and their ads are from Adsense. Am i missing something?

[super70s]

There's an interesting article in the most recent Economist magazine about the increase of ad blocking software and what companies like Google are doing to offset the impact.

I'm for the nastiest solution possible as long as it's effective, since AdBlock is nasty in itself in my view.

Poor widdle babies that can't stand to view a few ads.

[trebuchet]

I've been reading a bit about this practice. Many counsel against it, for fear of driving away a potential loyal visitor, losing backlinks, etc. But to me, a loyal visitor using adblocking is like the guy who occupies a seat in your restaurant and uses your free wifi for four hours, on one cup of coffee.

Today (Friday) was my worst day's earnings since January 2nd. Low PVs as expected for this time of the week/year but an abysmal CTR/EPC with it.

[Mentat]

All figures going down. Another round of layoffs is around the corner...

[RedBar]

Friday was yet another disaster however I am now seeing a pattern. Until this week my desktop earnings were about 60% of revenue, the last three days have been:

Weds 36.4%
Thurs 24.4%
Fri 23.1%

Desktop clicks for the past three days have been 49% of May/June 9th average.

Desktop EPC has been 57.8% of the same period with CTR at 64.1%.

Is anyone else seeing similar?

My Tablet/mobile earnings do not seem to have been affected...yet!

[netmeg]

I just run Vertoz and their ads are from Adsense. Am i missing something?

They use AdSense and other networks. It's in TOS if they're being served by Vertoz.

[Ironside]

Advertising is part of life, whether you're watching television or walking down the street, there is advertising all around you and there's nothing you can do about it. I think it would be in Google's best interest for both them, publishers and advertisers to come up with some kind of hack that gets around these ads blocking software devices.

I can see one side of the argument concerning adverts on websites, some sites are so aggressive with the advertising it's just plain annoying. I particularly hate the ones that display a pop-up after a few seconds blocking out what you're trying to read, then you got to try and find a tiny cross somewhere to close it down. However, non-aggressive advertising should not inhibit the users enjoyment at all. Therefore there is absolutely nothing wrong with adverts and they should be displayed, it's only fair.

[RedBar]

some sites are so aggressive with the advertising it's just plain annoying.

Absolutely, some of those particular sites seem to have lost all semblance of providing information whatsoever, their webmasters/whatevers really need a good kick in the rear because they ain't doing their sites any favours at all.

[nubchai]

I also agree. The auto-playing audio and vdieo ads are especially annoying. I have them blocked on all of my sites.

[super70s]

It could be argued AdBlock is responsible for the rise of prolific and annoying advertising methods as webmasters get more desperate for ad clicks in a shrinking market.

[jbayabas]

Yikes, Vertoz is slowing down my site. Removed.

[ember]

Vertoz didn't work for me either. I gave it a couple of weeks and the RPM was about 1/10th of Adsense. Even media.net is better than that.

[Ironside]

Does anybody get any income from YouTube? I don't think I get enough views to make any money. Mind you, YouTube is starting to irritate me, more and more videos I want to watch first of all involve me having to sit through an advert before I can watch the video, I find this very annoying indeed. The majority of them give you the chance to switch them off, but they are starting to increase the videos where you can't do that.

[HymnSite]

Two weeks into June and the downward crunch from GoogleAd revenue continues. Saturday's revenue compared with the prior Saturday was the closest, dropping only 5.3%. Week versus week was off 12.6%, but the longer 28-day period was still down a whopping 48.3%. The 24-cent RPM that I saw earlier this week from GoogleAds (they subsequently made adjustments and rounded it all the way up to 25 cents!) actually fell below Media.net for that day. Even though that was a one time event, the GoogleAd "bounce back" on the RPM rate is still stuck at barely a third of normal averages over the past few years, and struggles to keep ahead of Media.net.

I will continue focusing more on content than GoogleAd revenues. Remember when they wanted us to add g+ buttons to our pages? As soon as the buttons were in place, all incentives to have them disappeared. It just does not make sense to cater to Google requests. They are all distractions. The content of my site should not be.

[HymnSite]

@Ironside--I have not gone to revenue mode at YouTube yet because I need my materials to be usable during worship services. Ads don't work there. I have another service that has agreed to provide space, and I will post the materials there, too. When that is on track, I will be adding 1) ads to YouTube resources, and 2) a prominent link to the ad-free resource that people are not aware of right now.