January 2018 AdSense Earnings & Observations

[ivok]

Happy New Year !
I wish you have high CTR, CPC and RPM throughout the year!

Let's start the discussion about the January earnings :)

[frankleeceo]

@Cralamarre, Adsense is run by a big team each in charge of different parts. Although pubpolicycomm is the public voice or liaison, he might not know all the issues surrounding individual things. That's generally how things work in a big workplace environment. I am glad he will give the team an extra nudge and bring it to their attention. Maybe the crawler or some other moving parts are not working as intended. This year is indeed much softer than the past.

My earning is more dismal this current january at 35% of january 2018 / december 2017 earning. Last year the number was 61% january 2017 / december 2016. I am not seeing any improvement in RPM thus far. (And 66% for the january 2016 / december 2015). This translates to almost halved earning power this year.

@NickMNS, i respectfully doubt that might be the issue with the URL structure and crawler. I have few pages less than 200 or so which are viewed quite often, and I still believe they are impacted by this lack of demand / coverage aka blank ads. I personally think it's more about pageview frequency capping / personalization gone wild (which kind of relate to weak january demand), my most impacted sites have visitors that browse many pages by nature. While sites with less repeated pageviews are impacted less.

[sdksjdksjd]

@londrum
blank white spaces and if youl check the code, it's like ad was requested, but only wrapper (width x height) was delivered. No Javascript inside.
I even see blank squares in 'Ad Review Center'.

@NickMNS
I have 150000+ pages, 10+ years old website.
Sure many pages are outdated and most probably were not crawled for a while. They don't show any ads at all. This is the impact of the new policy. But it can't impact so hard the whole picture, since these pages were barely visited for a while anyway. They don't deliver ad cash.

In the same time, on the pages that deliver ad cash and obviously are crawled frequently, ads are shown partially. 'New policy' doesn't explain this. There is something else.

[NickMNS]

I am with you guys on the something else. I was initially very reluctant to believe that this new policy was the cause. But I when received the response from AdSense Support, it confirm that I was impacted at least in part. Now as I posted earlier, the direct impact I should expect is a 30% drop in impressions and revenue. I am seeing double that. So there are other factors at play. What those are will be very difficult to diagnose, one obvious factor is seasonality that must play some part in this. Chaos and confusion!

[riccarbi]

Adsense revenue and ad coverage seem slowly recovering. Yet, still about 30% lower than normal.

[nubchai]

The more I look at my sites, I think I fall into the "something else" group. My coverage is 92% and I'm not seeing backup or blank ad slots. I've tested this with different browsers and devices. I have been playing with the ad balancer a bit. I did find one issue with media.net ads not always displaying on tablets so I followed up with them.

[NickMNS]

@nubchai what does the "Ad Networks" report says for the last 30 days. Check impressions. Is it showing a drop of Adwords with an increase in 3rd parties?

[ember]

I'm back to thinking it is a glitch. I only have one page affected by low coverage, but I see well-targeted ads on it everytime I look at it. No white spaces. Reports say coverage is at 57%, but I am receiving very few clicks at all from that 57%, and the clicks I am receiving are worthless. I thought they were coming from third-party networks, but those reports do not jive with the clicks received.

[allhearts]

January has been dismal in general, but today (Wednesday) has been the worst day of the Month by far. I sort of had my hopes set on things getting better as the Month went along, but today was a real dagger to those hopes.

[starkid1990]

Hello everyone, im new to forums and earning money online so please spare me if this was the wrong place to post but I had a question. Im trying to figure out exactly how much i can earn with my website idea. I used a tool called longtailpro to analyze my main keyword which is getting 320,000 monthly searches, a competition value of 12 with a cpc of $6.50. It also tell me the Rank Value which is the estimated amount i'd earn per month if I rank #1 on Google and the value is $4,500. Is this realistic? I know if I were to rank #1 i would maybe secure only 50% of that 320,000 traffic. I was just unsure of the actual amount I could earn

[sdksjdksjd]

@starkid1990
))) forget about it. You're 10 years late with such approach.
And this is wrong place to ask such questions. Please don't flood here. Thanks )

[NickMNS]

Hey @starkid1990 welcome to Webmaster World. I love your enthusiasm, it is real nice to see among the recent doom and gloom. Let me start on a positive note, you have come to the right place. WW has community of very friendly and helpful people with a lot of experience (most are old farts! at least by millennial standards). and we are not afraid to tell it like it is and provide a lot of useful information and help. There is great forum "New to web development" here: [webmasterworld.com...] that has some more realistic threads on what it takes to get started in this business.

Now to the specifics of your post... how to say this. You have better chance of winning the lottery than ranking #1 for niche where you can get a $6.50 RPM, if that even exists.

6.50 RPM = $6.50 for every 1000 page views or $0.0065 per page view. To get a revenue of $4,500 you need 4500 / 0.0065 = 692000 page view per month based on pages/session of about 2 you would need about 350,000 users per month. or more or less average about 500 users per hour, which means you need to figure peak traffic at around 1000 user per hour, and less at night.

That is a lot of traffic. Even if such a level of traffic is attainable, it will either take you years to get there and if it doesn't then keeping the traffic will next to impossible.

Arghh...

I used a tool called longtailpro to analyze my main keyword which is getting 320,000 monthly searches

The irony!
See my most recent rant on the "long tail" here: [webmasterworld.com...]
I would hope that a site that uses the term "long tail" could at least know what it means.

It's been a long day...
I really strongly suggest that you back-up a bit in this thread a read what is currently going on. It should provide a pretty good primer of how difficult it is to make money as web publisher.

Good-luck, I don't mean to discourage you but inform you of the reality before you waste month of your life trying to achieve the unachievable.

To end on a positive note, if you think you can get rich quick forget it. On the other hand if you are passionate about the web, coding, writing, advertising and have project that you are will to give your everything to, then go for it but it wont be easy and at it wont happen quickly.

[capulkit]

Adsense is dead. Yesterday with 20k visits crossed only single digit earnings. This is not a news or entertainment site but related to tax and legal niche.

Adsense show me the money!

[starkid1990]

@NickMNS, Thank you for the kind reply. But one last question. So your saying even with extremely low competition, optimized SEO and an average 3-6 months ranking period as stated by many, its gonna take years to rank?

[NickMNS]

even with extremely low competition,

If the RPM for the niche is $6.50 there is definitely competition, typical RPM is about 2$, some niches can fetch you more other less but $2 is a reasonable estimate.

optimized SEO

What is that? SEO squared? Search Engine Optimization Optimization.

average 3-6 months ranking period

Are you planning on a pump n' dump. You may want to check out some of the blackhat forums.

[hindifun]

Suddenly reports under Targeting Type showing ad category of Run of Network.
Can someone please explain what are these ads?

[nubchai]

@NickMNS the Ad Networks report shows that Adwords impressions have been very consistent for the last 3 months. October impressions did drop a bit compared to September. I don't see a significant increase in other ad networks. Criteo has been gaining a bit but nowhere near the Adwords impressions

[Freezer]

I have been managing websites for years now. Yet, i truly considering removing all adsense units on all my websites because of the last drop in revenue.. it is disrespectful.. and i think i will go for direct or affiliate marketing instead

[andymorris]

Well, so fay January is absimal. The last two days, almost no clicks or so few although visits are way up.

Adsense, you suck.

[elman]

CPC, RPM and total earnings seem to be good today. Wait and see

[MayankParmar]

So I asked my AdPushup manager about the blank ads thing. He told me that Google basically wants to make whether or not 'our content is user-friendly'.

[nubchai]

@MayankParmar what did he mean by user-friendly content?

[NickMNS]

I'm seeing what appear to be unclickable ads with phone numbers showing up in ad-review. These are for plumbing services. So far there have only been 5 impressions today, so this is likely nothing. But worth keeping an eye open for.

[Maximum44]

@NickMNS We don't want those around. Especially if they get lots of impressions. Lets hope the impresions stay low. I lost enough traffic to them in the past. Havent seen them around for quite a while though.

[MayankParmar]

@Nubchai A ad placement setup which is user-friendly.

[MayankParmar]

@NickMNS I'm seeing astrologers ads :D Everywhere lol.


Even the matched content is blank. The site looks horrible :(

[EditorialGuy]

Yesterday was up 18 percent over the same day the previous week, and the last seven days are up 31 percent. So I really can't complain.

Mind you, this is typical for us at this time of year: Our doldrums are in November and December, and our traffic and revenue always start climbing again after Christmas. This has been true since the 1990s. (Sometimes performance has nothing to do with Google.)

[Cralamarre]

My RPM yesterday was up 16% from the previous week, and CPC was up 47%. Thanks to an increase in traffic, overall earnings were up 43%, and today is looking even better. RPM is still 40-50% lower than what it was before Christmas, but that's normal for January. Good overall coverage today, with the majority of ads coming from AdWords. No sign of any issues.

[nubchai]

@mayank thanks.

[kelsheikh]

Does anyone with the ad display issue from the update see any kind of uptick in their coverage percentage?

[MayankParmar]

Coverage today 97% vs 94% yesterday. Improved slightly :D

Blank ads is ruining the user experience, this is really bothering me :(