August 2016 AdSense Earnings and Observations

After a dry July, what will August hold?

[trebuchet]

I guess it's my turn to kick it off. July is gone and we're heading into the last month of summer (in the northern hemisphere). Will Adsense RPM recover in August - or is the downturn here to stay?

[ember]

Never.

[netmeg]

I also don't mess with channels. I make new ones.

Ok so all week I've noticed a bunch of ad-clicking bots across multiple sites, and I've narrowed them down to coming from a service provider called Digital Ocean (they run a cloud computing service similar to AWS) So if you've been noticing unusual click behavior or getting big clawbacks, you might want to take a look. Unfortunately they're big and they have a boatload of IP ranges, so it's like swatting mosquitoes, but I'm blocking what I notice. Just passing it along.

[Ironside]

I have various channels which relate to my most popular AdSense units so I will always make a new channel if I'm creating either a test unit, or creating another ad unit for a page.

at the moment, my earnings are pretty much stable and I'm earning thereafter same every day, give or take a couple of quid. Looks like we will exceed the second portion of £xxx so I'm not complaining at the moment.

Media.net has been quite good, last month payment was over a hundred quid which top things up nicely. If you haven't looked at eBay affiliate links then maybe you should. I don't make an awful lot. I think I made £31 in July, however this month is going to be £39. So again, not much, but it all adds up at the end of the day.

[FourDegreez]

Is reporting messed up today?

[NickMNS]

Could be, I am seeing GA reporting higher values than Adsense, so it is possible that Adsense is delayed.

[kindle44]

Yes, I'm noticing the same thing. GA is way ahead of of Adsense today. I was wondering if I was the only one experiencing this.

[Whatagreatdayitis]

Stats look weird today. Page views are down while RPM is way up. Earnings look about right for this time of day--maybe a little better. Thank God the Olympics are over.

[pocket calculator]

Anyone else see a huge jump in visibility (active view viewable) today?

(edit): Nevermind, it seems like a reporting glitch, things are back to normal.

[Mentat]

Bad news...
IronSource deceptive ads (the worse scum of toolbar/adware) are back on Adsense!

[imgur.com...]

[breeks]

Media.net in your city

Remember adsense in your city?

Got an invite to media's version of this for next month. (cup of coffee / meal.)

Will check it out see what they have to say.

[Ironside]

At least media.net show relative ads to your niche. Having said that, I see a lot of Google ads showing in media.net space. Hopefully that's just me that seeing them

[trebuchet]

I'm not sure how recent this is, however I've noticed that clicking the 'X' on Adsense ads now brings up a menu, and one of the options is "Ad covers the page". Seems to be linked to the recent warnings about content-obscuring ads above the fold.

[vegasrick]

I'm not sure if Adsense is screwed up today, but my Page Views and everything else seems out of whack. I just checked my page views and they are like 5K less than what they were earlier. Not sure what's going on.

[dolcevita]

My page views are also today 25% less than usually.G Analytics does not show nothing unusual regarding traffic and wonder whats going on today.

[Ironside]

You are not alone guys, I think I am up to about 95p so far today and just over 1000 page views, well down

[nubchai]

Page views are down here too. Ad quality has declined too.

[trebuchet]

All very nice here today. PVs as expected and CTR has nudged over 1% for the first time in goodness knows how long.

[dolcevita]

It looks as they have fixed issue a couple hours later.At least i've seen 5000 PV more within hour and right now everything is alright.

[Whatagreatdayitis]

I had a good day yesterday, Friday. Page views were about the same, but RPM was up almost 80%. I'm also noticing SERP improvement.

[trebuchet]

The first six hours of today are like the glory days of Adsense, circa 2005. High traffic, plenty of clicks and many big value clicks.

Which of course means I'm preparing to be kicked in the teeth.

[EditorialGuy]

We''ve mostly had a mixture of decent and so-so (but not dreadful) days in August, which is to be expected for our site and topic at this time of year.

Yesterday, however, was a boffo day, and our average earnings were up significantly for both yesterday and the last week.

In other words, "same old, same old": AdSense is a bid-based system, so it stands to reason that every day isn't going to be the same.

[ember]

What happened to Red Bar? Half the posts in here used to be from him. Did he finally give up on Adsense?

[frankleeceo]

It was a day where a few people all commented asking him to stop with "i am removing adsense from my sites".

I kinda miss the guy. His insights were indeed helpful (aside from the "just another low day of adsense").

With the month coming into an end. Here's my monthly observation.

It is business as usual. I do not see significant changes year over year. I do experience some income drop mainly because I am shifting more units to RTB networks.

[trebuchet]

Yes, Red Bar was "removing Adsense from my sites this month" for about eight months in a row. He must have finally done it. Can't say I blame him for feeling bitter. The way he tells it he was screwed big time with the great Google Images heist, then with tumbling Adsense returns.

This month has been on par with July as far as CTR and RPM go. Looking forward to my traffic spiking between now and Christmas, and seeing how earnings pan out.

[koan]

Redbar's story is a cautionary tale about not taking financial windfalls for granted in the world of web publishing. Today's traffic or income source can dry up tomorrow. Just like nature, the internet is not fair, it is chaotic and impersonal.

[Ironside]

August earnings were slightly down on July's, however I was still into the second portion of £xxx. Media.net will probably finish off around $140 and eBay will probably be about 20 or £30. I don't do much with AdSense these days, I I haven't touched any ad units in over a month, I think I found the optimal layout so I might as well leave things be. I think it's very wise to look upon AdSense as a little bit of a bonus, pocket money at the end of the month, certainly not to be relied on.

[RedBar]

I'm here but only as a lurker these days since I don't feel I can contribute much at present since my days of multi million PVs are long well and gone thanks to the Google image heist.

I took the decision on January 1st this year that I would give it until 30th June to see if anything would improve with AdSense itself otherwise I'd think about it but, more importantly, work on my real world business sites.

Believe it or not August's AdSense had a 25% earnings' increase over July and with it traditionally being one of my quietest times of year, quite unusual, but don't let's forget, we're talking a 25% increase of just above minimum payout levels, not the old thousands I used to earn.

I have removed and combined some old small specialist sites and, at long last, I've completely converted my formerly largest business site into html5 responsive and at the same time made all sites more focused and deleted thousands of widget images. If I can't have the traffic to my unique images, then neither can Google or Bing to that matter.

All the html5 sites are only running one responsive ad at the bottom of each page with slightly more than a 1% CTR, nearly 27% of August's earnings coming from mobile alone with an EPC almost identical to desktop.

Interestingly with all these focused modifications my realworld business enquiries and actual orders have increased at a time of year when I would normally not be receiving hardly anything whatsoever.

September until Thanksgiving is traditionally the start of a good trading period, we shall see!

[trebuchet]

Payment for August finalised. Clawback was in the region of 4%.

August 2016 vs August 2015
PVs up 24%
Clicks down 18%
RPM down 24%
Earnings up by 1%

So in the past year I added almost 1,000 pages of content and grew traffic substantially, just to hold steady. Nice.