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 :)

[Cralamarre]

@MrJefe The new YouTube policy states that a channel must have at least 4000 hours of watch time within the past 12 months (along with at least 1000 subscribers) to qualify for ads. I don't know why they've included a subscriber number since anyone can subscribe to a channel and then never return. But note that the other requirement is watch time, not views. 4000 hours of watch time is very different from 4000 views.

[ember]

Google always has favored advertisers over publishers. They could care less about their publisher network

No advertisers means no Adsense. We should be thankful for advertisers.

[ember]

The idiot Logan Paul, the guy who posted a video of a child's suicide in a forest, is what has brought this latest YT change. I can't say that I blame Google. Huge portions of YT are a cesspool. I wouldn't want to advertise on it.

[NickMNS]

@ember I wouldn't credit a single idiot. There is an army of them, one worse then the next. But this is the law of large numbers the degree of idiocy varies and when one allows billions of video produced by people that each are subject to the idiocy factor (as it is part of being human) then no matter how small the probability the human suffering from a 6 sigma idiocy condition will be able to have his/her video shown. And since the video wll be such an outlier then it will most likely go viral for everyone to see and be scandalized. Its in the math, it can't be stopped.

All these efforts may appear to be working, but it still just a probability game. Now one may need to wait a few weeks longer between incidents but none of these steps will eliminate the risk completely.

[Cralamarre]

What's unfortunate is that this new YouTube policy would have done nothing to prevent the Logan Paul fiasco. All it really does is treat new YouTubers as potential Logan Pauls, or worse, until proven otherwise.

I'd like to think that one day, YouTube will mature, but the problem isn't so much YouTube as it is the people who watch YouTube. The world wouldn't know who Logan Paul, or PiewDiePie, or any of these other idiots are if it wasn't for their millions of followers. So until the viewers mature, which is never going to happen, YouTube will continue to be known as the place where morons become stars.

[jbayabas]

Google is getting bigger especially with the successful launch of Google Home, which I believe is the future. I have one; it can play music, videos, turn on lights, lock doors, etc. Publishers are dispensable. It’s true — the rich are getting richer, poor poorer. Google can do anything it wants. So unjust. C’est la vie.

[kelsheikh]

No advertisers means no Adsense. We should be thankful for advertisers.

No publishers means no Adwords. Its a balancing act.

Google search ads alone didn't create the giant.

[ember]

No publishers means no Adwords. Its a balancing act.

Uh, no. Adwords' search network does not depend on publishers. Only the display network depends on publishers and is used to expand Adwords' reach. That we make money is a byproduct. I wouldn't be surprised if one day Google decides that the display network is not worth the headaches. Just spend some time in their help forums.

[londrum]

it could quite easily be the other way round... maybe the huge reach of the display network will one day make it more valuable to google than the dwindling traffic to their search engine.
none of the other big search engines like altavista or yahoo stayed at the top forever

it's not going to happen any time soon, but it could happen one day

[UpOnOne]

Monday I saw an improvement in earnings, income was back up to 70% of normal, which surprised me because all my traffic is from the US and it was a holiday. The only change I made was to improve my page speed and switch to ASYNC ads. This gave me a notice in Adsense that I now have all 3 checkmarks in the User First Program. Tuesday and today earnings are back down below 50% of normal.

On another note, I noticed something interesting with adding new pages to my site. Depending which computer I am using and how many interest-based cookies are set in the browser I sometimes see ads instantly. Browsing in a Chrome Incognito window shows NO ads whether the page is new or not. Even if I revisit hours later, no ads.

I also received the "How did your site perform with AdSense in December" email this morning. Their only suggestion was to switch my ads to ASYNC.

My back up ads that normally see a few impressions a day are currently getting 10-15,000 impressions daily. Too bad that only makes me a few cents.

[kelsheikh]

@ember yea i edited my response just before you submitted to clarify.

Look I am both an advertiser and a publisher. It is a balancing act. You think their display network doesn't make them who they are and that search alone drives the bus? They need all parts. They need the advertisers to make the money from and they need a their pool of publishers. This update and the update with YT is them trying clean up their network. I don't like it obviously, mainly because it was poorly implemented and since I lost a ton of revenue.

[MrJefe]

@MrJefe The new YouTube policy states that a channel must have at least 4000 hours of watch time within the past 12 months (along with at least 1000 subscribers) to qualify for ads. I don't know why they've included a subscriber number since anyone can subscribe to a channel and then never return. But note that the other requirement is watch time, not views. 4000 hours of watch time is very different from 4000 views.

I think I'm lost on the point you're making.

[Cralamarre]

@MrJefe, I initially said that on YouTube, subscriber numbers and the number of views are meaningless, to which you replied that YouTube obviously doesn't agree because their new policy includes a certain number of views that needs to be reached. That's incorrect. The new policy refers to watch time, not views. That was my point.

[MayankParmar]

Things had improved but today again, earnings back to poor numbers :(

[Maximum44]

Really poor earnings for wednesday.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

From my point of view, the things that happened with Adsense earnings for publishers in last 1,5 months are showing a huge problem of overcrowding in the industry. I think that we witnessed a huge significant drop in ads inventory during this “summer holidays” period and it was (and actually it is still happening) the worst one for years for many of us.

I’m pretty sure that through years Google provoked a big interest in publishing Adsense content among webmasters and entrepreneurs all over the world – after that a lot of people started blogging or Youtubbing thinking of getting a great revenue. That was a good move in a few years for Google, but right now the publisher’s inventory is overfilled by content with a lack of quality because of that (thin posts, lack of expertise posts, low quality rewriting, low quality videos etc.). That lead to low CPC and RPM (a lot of ad places, but the amount of advertiser are pretty much the same), from the other side – our visitors are changing, they become more picky because of Internet overfilled their lives and conversions are falling from year to year over the last time.

Last changes in YouTube policy only confirms that problem. My opinion is that Google team trying to get rid of low-quality publishers to rise the RPM and their own revenue (at least on Youtube, last years it has drastically increased it’s traffic all over the world). I wouldn’t be surprised when in the common future we will see that the Adsense policy will also change (and since then as a webmaster you will also will need some good amount and quality of the traffic on your website to be approved to Adsense).

[Ironside]

Awful day yesterday. I decided to put a few more media.net ads on my pages and that was actually a better day on that particular earning front. I've put some more 300 x 600 ads in place on a few pages and rearrange some ads so we'll see what happens today.

[kelsheikh]

I actually just received a crawl error for the first time ever for 'Page Not Found'. I've never ever seen a crawl error in that report till now.

[Cralamarre]

Oddly enough, I just noticed my first crawl errors as well. Never had them before. My report shows 5 crawl errors. However, they're all for pages that don't actually exist, so I'm guessing they're from broken links from other sites.

[sdksjdksjd]

@Cyril TechWebsites
Pure speculation. There is absolutely no any evidence.

[sdksjdksjd]

@Ironside
I'm thinking to join media.net after this AdSense mess.
Can we use both on the same page?

[azlinda]

@sdksjdksjd Think long and hard before you use Media.Net. My RPM was $0.01 with them yesterday. And, yes, you can use GA and MN on the same page.

[Ironside]

You can only have three media.net ads on each page like Google used to do. However, unlike Google, you should find that the media.net ads follow your niche and therefore are probably more likely to get clicked on. I can't guarantee that when they click on the ads will find what they're looking for, but at least the buttons will have the right text on them.

You won't get the same revenue as Google, that is for sure. But I've had days where I've made $10. I know that's not very much but if you have every day but $300 at the end of the month. Having said that, if you have a website that receives 100,000 hits every day then I reckon you could do really really well with media.net. If your website gets less than 1000 hits every day then you'll probably make very little indeed.

[CommandDork]

Me too on the crawler error in Adsense.

Never had anything show in this section of my acct before (15+ yrs). The url is a page on one of my sites but with extra characters added in to make it inaccurate - just like how GSC shows bad urls in its own reporting. Wonder if this section of Adsense will now become active because of the new changes to ad crawling.

[Cralamarre]

@CommandDork, Exactly the same thing here. The blocked URLs are links to actual pages but with additional characters on the end. I don't think there's much we can do about them, but since they link to pages that don't exist, they shouldn't affect earnings.

[NickMNS]

@Cyril I see where you are coming from but I see it from a different perspective. Adsense makes money regardless of the specific website that the ads appear on. The more ads shown, the more revenue. Keeping the cost of advertising low drives demand, so AdSense has every interest to provide an unlimited supply as this will guarantee low prices. Obviously as a publisher this is not in your interest.

The problem as I see it, and I assume AdSense/AdWords sees it too, is that there is a limit to this strategy, and there must be some minimal quality guideline that must be adhere to by the sites that show the ads. Now AdSense/AdWords has realized that the bar was set little too low and they are trying to raise it. I am certain that this is coming at a cost to them. But the cost is likely less than the cost of doing nothing and risking the loss of big advertisers, the whales.

Ultimately this change should be embraced by those publishers that adhere to these new standards. But let me tell you it is extremely disheartening to find yourself on the wrong side of that line. Specially when it is for technical reasons and not actual quality reasons.

As for those considering the switch to media.net or other networks. Be aware that if you pull your Adsense code off your pages those pages will be dropped from the AdSense index, meaning that an eventual return to AdSense may be a long and drawn out process.

Also putting ads from two separate networks on a single page is sub-optimal, there will be two auction, where supply is increased and demand split in two, one auction may be selling at fair price whereas the other may be paying far less. Ideally if you want to integrate multiple networks it is probably a good idea to use something like DFP to ensure that all parties are bidding on all the inventory.

[ember]

Plus media.net apparently has no idea about the upcoming Chrome filter. I don't know what all of their ads look like, but I'd be a little concerned that Chrome might not like some of them.

[NickMNS]

@ember very true, and Chrome filter roll-out is less than a month away.

[NickMNS]

RE: Crawl errors.

In all the years with AdSense today is the first time I have ever noticed errors. Cannot find "localhost:8080". I would be very worried if the crawler could find my localhost.

[MayankParmar]

I'm seeing crawl errors on WordPress posts preview page -_-