February 2016 AdSense Earnings and Observations

[RedBar]

January was a mighty rollercoaster for many, surely February won't continue in the same vein?

[JS_Harris]

With the introduction of AMP requiring changes in code for mobile traffic I contemplated how I would re-tool my site. The stated goal of AMP was speed so I made major speed improvements sitewide.

The result? My pages look bad because they load so fast that I have holes where the adsense should be. The adsense ads "pop" onto the page much later and, sometimes, actually cause misclicks so I have to make sure their divs are fixed in size ahead of time so nothing "moves" which causes temporary empty space. Fixed anything is not responsive, the ads need to get faster... especially with AMP here. That's my only complaint.

If any of you have been online working with Ad-sense, do a Monthly Page RPM check for the past say 3 to 5 years, and let me know what you have noticed.

The number is meaningless to me over that span because site changes have increased pageviews. I'm serving more pages per visitor which has the effect of suppressing RPM. If you remove "matched content" or similar pages section and place an ad there instead you serve fewer pages but earn more per pageview causing RPM to rise, but of course search engines dislike you a little more so it's a balancing act.

I added a matched content unit recently, I now serve more pages for less in total earnings and it crashed my RPM a bit. Made my visitors and google happy though.

[koan]

My sites load pretty fast, performance has always been a concern of mine over fancier stuff. What delays my pages are third party javascript code for ads, social media buttons and analytics.

[Aniston Dillo]

for 30000 page view yesterday, got only 8.60$, RPM bellow 0.30$. Will wait till end of first week of March, if RPM not going to increase then I have to remove all ads from my all pages, because I don't want to show others' content on my site for almost free. We have to get enough money for giving space of our site to somebody, after all it makes our sites look down...

[Ironside]

11,000 page views yesterday, 19,286 impressions, 51 clicks. Along with 63p page rpm and 36p impression rpm my earnings were £6.90 p yesterday.

On Tuesday I received 21,384 page views, 26,806 impressions, I received 55 clicks. Page rpm was 55p, impression rpm was 44p, earning £11.83 p that day. So I am absolutely none the wiser to what is going on.

The figures will not tell you anything meaningful whatsoever in my opinion. It all depends on how much someone is paying you for individual clicks on the units you have on your website.

Today I am at 850 page views, 2864 impressions, 15 clicks and earnings are £3.46 p so far. However, my page rpm is £4.08 p, and my impression rpm is at £1.21 p.

So when page views and page impressions are normal my page rpm is nice and high. As soon as it changes page rpm drops like a stone, probably to compensate for the amounts of page views, obviously they don't want to pay out too much money. But even so, doesn't seem to affect the earnings that much.

[Ironside]

Here we go again. Page views have risen quite a bit, not as much as they have been doing. However page rpm has dropped right down to 77p again. Earnings are stuck just below £5. This seems to be a trend with this now, let's hope that it doesn't start happening every single day.

[RedBar]

Ahhh, now I have the inflated PVs and impressions for the first time yesterday at about 200% for one site and 900% of the reality for another site, both sites' traffic were completely normal.

Good stuff G, how'd you do that?

[RedBar]

An addenum to my last post, ALL the increased PVs seem to have been on tablet and mobile, desktop appears to be normal.

[Ironside]

Here we go again, page views so far that they are 7142. My page rpm has dropped to 35p

[Rasputin]

Ironside, are your adsense pageviews consistent with your analytics/server pageviews?
There is a problem with adsense at the moment showing 1000s of extra (incorrect) pageviews, which also makes rpm wrong.
If your earnings are consistent but pvs and rpm fluctuating a lot that is likely to be the problem, it's been going on a while now (10 days?).

[RedBar]

Today I'm getting a lot of false AdSense PVs purporting to be from Indonesia, how are you doing that G?

[Ironside]

Rasputin I haven't really done a lot of digging around in analytics to see what's going on. But there is definitely a problem somewhere because I suppose I get an average of 5000 page views each day, and 15,000 impressions. However, for the last few days page views have been quadrupled and more, and impressions have been 20 odd thousand as well. When this happens page rpm drops to just a few pence whereas normally it's around £2.50 p average. I don't think earnings of been affected too much, although the last couple of days have been slightly down on normal, but that's to be expected. I don't think there's anything to get hysterical about, I just keep an eye on the money at the end of the day, not really bothered about doing all the figures because that doesn't tell you anything.

[MrSavage]

Whelp on one particular site, and this is no joke, media.net is going to give me more pennies than Adsense. As a test project, I may in fact ditch Adsense all together on this one site and just see what happens. For what it's worth, this is a significant situation. Not saying media.net is filling my pockets, but I'm just saying that for around the first time, something is outperforming Adsense over a decent period of time. I call it S and S'ittier. I'll take the S at this point.

[Aniston Dillo]

so, adsense is losing the grip in the market, also publishers are diverting to other ad networks.

[MrSavage]

I'm just a bit stunned at how this is going. Not that long ago, one of those clicks would equal what I've made for an entire day lately. So 24 hours to make enough to surpass a single click. I guess in terms of stock markets, this would be a market crash. I just never thought that I would see such a quick a sudden crash. It's pretty much been weeks at this point. When I speak about media.net, it's not an endorsement at all. It's more a statement on how Adsense is performing right now. It's actually insulting right now to think I've dedicated space on my site for these types of revenues. The only thing keeping them active is the hope (passing) that Adsense is experiencing triple condom protection because of issues on the back end. I honestly don't give a rats ass about many of my sites at this point simply because ad revenues don't make any efforts/time worthwhile. When this crossroads is clearly crossed, I'm sure there will be a big chuck of publishers who say F this. Good news for some of course. You can die a slow death or get it over quickly. I get a sense of how Adsense is treating publishers right now. Not enough communication for my liking. Out of respect, at least explain why things are this abysmal.

[netmeg]

I'm making some changes. Probably only leave the AdSense up in one placement for desktop only on each site; will test some other monetization ideas while we redesign the sites to be more app-like. As it happens, our consulting portion of the business has taken a pretty big jump, and I think maybe this year will be a good year to focus on usability and user experience on the sites, and make revenue a secondary or tertiary priority. Not giving up on it by a long shot, but I'm afraid if I leave it a top priority, other things will suffer, and I want to play a long game, not a short one.

Also I'm really tired of seeing things like this on my sites.

[imgur.com...]

[Ironside]

I know what you mean Meg, some of the ads that appear on my sites are ridiculous and I can't imagine anyone is going be interested in whatsoever. After all, why are Google advertising their own adverts on my website?

[silentneedle]

For me that's nothing new, especially after the year change it's not that hard anymore to outperform adsense. Our rpm dropped 50%.

[EditorialGuy]

so, adsense is losing the grip in the market, also publishers are diverting to other ad networks.

Look at it from Google's point of view:

- Publishers who perform well for AdSense stick around.

- Publishers who don't perform well for AdSense leave.

For Google, it's a win-win.

[breeks]

They would rather get a click for search ads than AdSense.
Looks they will be using four ads on top of search results and removing ads from the right side of its desktop.
That might push some advertising to Adsense for some "cheap clicks" because those top four ads are going to be expensive.
Bottom line Google does what is best for Google, not publishers. <=== Google's point of view.

[EditorialGuy]

They would rather get a click for search ads than AdSense.

It isn't that simple, for several reasons:

1) A lot of AdSense ads are display ads (some of them very profitable display ads, in my experience), and Google doesn't run display ads on its SERPs.

2) For CPC text ads, AdSense represents a second chance for Google to "get the click" when a searcher has chosen an organic result.

3) On sites where users typically look at more than one page, or where not all users arrive via search, AdSense ads supply impressions and potential clicks that would Google would miss out on if it relied solely on search ads.

[MrSavage]

I know for certain that most everything that I write online I'm willing to stand behind, for better or for worse. Integrity is everything to me. I hope that if people are reading my revenue situation currently, that it's not fluffed up and it's not because I'm out to diss Google. On the other hand, after a while it becomes clear that most people base their opinions (this thread is about observations and not opinions) on their own riches. If Google is a great revenue provider, then all is good and most people will see the goodness and not state the realistic or actual view of what's going on. I can honestly say that even if I'm raking it in right now, I'm not advising friends to invest their time in a venture that relies on organic traffic. Integrity at times is a foreign concept.

I'm just saying here, that the past few weeks are either a basic lock down, or this is in fact the crossroads. I just don't know. I've been at this a good number of years and it's been fantastic and made webmastering worthwhile. If this is dead, so be it. However it's too perplexing for me personally right now to think that it could end this way. I think in a way this hasn't really set in for me. I could walk in the alley behind my building, collect bottles and cans in 30 minutes and make more than 24 hours of this. There is no way that over an extended period of time that publishers will stay silent. Disbelief is what I have, but I'm not everyone. I'm sure a good 20% are flourishing.

[trebuchet]

Today was one of my worst days ever. The main culprit was an appalling CTR, down to around 0.5%. Even the US, which usually hovers between 1.3-2.2%, was down under 0.4%. Six figure PVs and I've barely made it to three figure earnings. Absolute garbage.

[Ebuzz]

It seems when there is an especially bad downturn, this is felt by everyone all across the board, and across all niches and industries. Just like most of you, I had an awful weekend. Pretty bad, and this further convinces me that tough times are coming this year, in line with a lot of economic predictions.

The only annoying thing is the cognitive dissonance among those involved in this industry, from Google down to their partners. No one is talking about the steady downward trend ever since 2016 began, and everyone is still acting upbeat like everything is normal. This is what pisses me off.

[RedBar]

Sunday saw over-inflated PVs for me again, mostly from the USA and mostly on tablets and mobile.

This happened in the last 9 hours or so.

Click volume down slightly, EPC down drastically especially US.

[vdR7]

I have a video on youtube who now reach more than 3,5 Milion views but i didnt monetize because i didnt have rights for that...today i got a email from this company www.networkofone.com...they are willing to pay to me for that video...but in In exchange of the payment, they like to run their approved Google advertisements on this video...the message i got fro them is :>>> We're basically just buying the advertising rights - you still own the videos. Moreover, your channel will remain independent and the agreement would not effect the other videos on your channel, or any future uploads. <<<Also this message >>>> We have direct partnership with Google/YouTube, so we send a claim on this video. Only thing you have to do on your side is to accept the claim on this video through the Video Manager section of your YouTube channel.<<<

Pls tell me its is possible this ? or is it just spam or cheat here?

[Whatagreatdayitis]

If you don't have rights to the content, YouTube might block ads from showing. Even a copywrited song playing in the background of a video might trigger a block.

[Ironside]

It looks as though inflated page views and impressions is going to become a daily occurrence, certainly seems to be a trend for me at the moment. Having said that, it hasn't really affected my daily earnings that much, yesterday's earnings were okay, certainly not down on what I've started to get used to in the last two or three months.

It's just after 1 o'clock in the afternoon here and my page views are at 3729, impressions are at 4809, I've had five clicks and earned 90p. Page rpm is at 24p, impression rpm is at 19p. But I've come to ignore these figures now because they don't really have much effect on my earnings.

I often get messages from people who claim they can help me earn lots of money for me. I've always been very dubious about any company that needs to approach me in order to try and get work.

[jbayabas]

Pretty bad, and this further convinces me that tough times are coming this year, in line with a lot of economic predictions.

And yet Google stocks continue to go up. Google is like Walmart, they don't care about their employees as long as they rip all the profits. Show some compassion to the little guys Goog. We've been with you for many years and you treat us like garbage. It hurts.

[Ironside]

Is it too much to ask for one of Google's representatives to try and explain why a lot of us have seen our earnings fall by more than half in just two years. There's obviously something going on somewhere.

[RedBar]

And today's inflated PVs so far by 1200% v USA is ... Canada, and once again mostly on tablet and mobile.