February 2018 AdSense Earnings & Observations

[MayankParmar]

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System: The following 33 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adsense/4880340.htm [webmasterworld.com] by martinibuster - 9:06 am on Feb 2, 2018 (utc -5)

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No improvements here guys, it's all dead and getting worse.

Last day of January is really pathetic :(

[RedBar]

Unusual EPCs for my widget sector today with India outperforming the USA by almost 22% whereas it's normally less than 5% of the value!

[sdksjdksjd]

Does anybody still see blank ads?

[vegasrick]

Ive noticed my CTR has really dropped from last February, even with a lot more views. Very strange.

[RedBar]

Does anybody still see blank ads?

Yep, definitely on low-trafficked or new pages.

[danielpalafo]

Hello,

We have an issue going on since the end of January where somedays, everything is normal. We usually get an RPM of around 1,50 - 2 $ and suddenly, the next day, it crashes to 0.40 for no reason at all! So we get 1/4 of the revenue we were getting! It is really frustrating because we don't know what we do wrong. We have same traffic, same users...

Anybody had this problem? Thanks. It never happened before. First time ever. (We use Adsense since 2008).

[azlinda]

There is truly only one thing you can count on...you can't count on anything with AdSense.

[sdksjdksjd]

Anybody had this problem?

Almost everybody here. No solution so far.

[danielpalafo]

Each time I contacted Google, they always gave me different answers. First it was some crawling errors... and the next day they told me it was ok. Next time I contacted them they said to me that my ads received a lot of accidental clicks? 3 days after: No more accidental clicks. And I contacted them another time 2 days ago and I did not get an answer back from them.

[soopablogga]

@danielpalafo yes I have the same issue. I have a strong, strong feeling it may have to do with the upcoming better ads initiative. I've had zero issues with coverage. Just low CPC and CTR, and the ad quality appears to be pretty low. Very few major corporate advertisers, less video ads etc.

Also if anyone could help me with this I'd appreciate it: [webmasterworld.com...]

[Ironside]

Absolutely shocking here now. In fact, I'm not joking when I say it's looking like daily earnings could drop below £1 very soon. It really does look like AdSense is over for me. I think Google is doing it on purpose to get rid of the people they don't want, but they are doing it in an underhanded manner so that they don't get the blame for just kicking people off for no reason.

[Mentat]

This is awesome:

Your payments are currently on hold because you have not verified your address.

1. There is no "Action button", no way to enter the PIN (if I had one)
2. I'm not from US and I'm with Adsense from the first year; I've received tons of mailed checks, now I have EFT

I suspect a glitch in the matrix.

[not2easy]

It's a glitch: [webmasterworld.com...]

[kegnum]

Man adsense is going for the record number of glitches in the last few months... there have been more odd issues with them since april that i think the entire 10 years i have been with them. unreal.

[azlinda]

...they are doing it in an underhanded manner so that they don't get the blame for just kicking people off for no reason.

Ironside, this has been my supposition for quite some time. I agree with you 100%.

[Unshiny]

I agree azlinda and ironside...they don't want me....and the email they send out ... "We have noticed your earnings are down...why?" What a kick in the teeth....

[NickMNS]

AdSense is agnostic, they don't care where their ads show (provided the websites abide by their policies). The more sites the better for AdSense, the cost of maintaining one more account open is negligible. More site == more inventory to sell == lower prices == more demand == more volume == more profit for AdSense. Your content is a commodity, like soy, corn or wheat and right now the silos are full and content keeps coming.

There are only two ways out, volume, increase your volume. This is difficult as your volume in measured in impressions not in content created and the only way to increase impressions is to get more users from search or SM. Two, is differentiation. Standout, build a brand that advertisers will seek out, again difficult. The one good thing is that these options are not mutually exclusive and the second often drive the first.

[MayankParmar]

Well AdSense is dominating this platform as most of the publishers are with them. If we publishers decide to boycott AdSense, just like how the publishers boycotted AMP, things might improve.

It's really bad here despite huge rise in traffic. Yesterday, the pageviews were 67K and earnings were only 15% higher than the average traffic day (that's around 40K these days). Tier one countries views, and still overall CPC is below 0.10$, it used to be no less than 0.50-60$ on good old days, with the US above 1, but now it's not even 0.50 :(

record number of glitches in the last few months.

Yep, they have hired interns!

[vegasrick]

Ive noticed a real decline in CTR over the course of the last two weeks.

Nothing has changed about the site and there are some monster traffic days, but our numbers continue to decline in terms of CTR.

At first I thought those non-clickable ads were back, but I don't believe that's the case.

However, I do see a lot of Google related errors in Chrome, which may be affecting the clicks.

It might be time to dump Adsense and switch over to Adx.

[MayankParmar]

AdX is better (normal) than AdSense in Feb, how is that possible?

[Jaideemaak]

I think Google is doing it on purpose to get rid of the people they don't want, but they are doing it in an underhanded manner so that they don't get the blame for just kicking people off for no reason.

They have no need to do this. If they wanted to get rid of small sites and low earning publishers from Adsense they could just raise the bar - exactly the same as they have done with YouTube. They could easily introduce a minimum number of page views and unique visitors for Adsense monetisation, the same way as they have introduced a 4,000 hour per year minimum watch time and minimum of 1,000 subscribers for YouTube. I don't believe the top people at Google lose much sleep over the plight of their publishers. If they want to get rid of publishers they will just do it and not resort to making the programme so bad that people leave voluntarily.

[riccarbi]

I'm not the Oracle of Delphi, but IMHO there should be a correlation (which doesn't mean causation, of course) between the Better Ads thing an the RPM drop since December, definetely.
I watched carefully that video from Google about BAS and I dind't find a single mention that a correlation between the two is excluded. My guess is that, until your website is not reviewed, ADs won't be blocked in Chrome but, at the same time, you'll be kept is a sort of purgatory and won't get almost any high-paying ADs from Adsense, Adwords and so on, only a lot of low-quality sort of backup ADs from Google itself and/or third party networks. Since websites are presumably reviewed based on their traffic, small publishers are penalized; but, in Google's mind "hey, ... who on earth cares about small publishers!"

Why this scenario makes sense to me? Because BAS was invented as a contermeasure against Ad Blockers and until Google hasn't reviewed your site, it is clearly much better for them to send you Ads that can't be in any way perceived as "intrusive" by users; therefore, only text-based Ads and pieces of nothing G sends on its own.

In the last weeks, I had a reasonably acceptable RPM on average, yet with huge ups and downs from day to day; today (Feb 15th, with that BAS deployed) I am only getting pure garbage with 0 clicks (yes... 0, nothing, nada, nil).
Collelation is not causation, but "You sin in thinking bad about people - but, often, you guess right."

[RedBar]

@ Ironside

Are your PVs and traffic sources still the same?

[Ironside]

@Redtraffic is down quite a bit. I just checked using the statistics cPanel and compared the last January and February daily pageviews are down by about 3000 each day. Having said that, I'm still getting 2000 hits every day so the amounts my AdSense of dropped by definitely worse than should be if I go by past earnings. I think I am like you now, things are so bad it's really hardly worth doing. I'll be extremely lucky if I reach three figures this month. The last time my earnings were only in two figures was when I first started with AdSense.

[RedBar]

daily pageviews are down by about 3000 each day.

Purely a guess however have you now been hit by localisation, is it mainly USA traffic that's down?

Touch wood, I'm still making the minimum however, as you know my sites are corporate so they would still be there, if they were purely hobby I would have walked away a long time ago. The really annoying thing is that my CTR and RPM are very good, it's simply the depletion of USA traffic that's my issue with G meanwhile they continue to push US widget sites in the UK SERPs where they cannot supply, arghhh!.

[nubchai]

@riccarbi out of all of the analyses I've read, yours makes the most sense.

[nubchai]

@Redbar just curious. Has Google reviewed your corporate sites?

[azlinda]

There is an online article in the Guardian today called "Can we really trust Google as judge, jury and executioner?" regarding the Chrome browser automatically blocking ads.

[Ironside]

@Red I wouldn't have a clue about localisation to be honest with you. I think I'll still make the minimum payout each month quite easily so it's not as if the money is going to dry up altogether. However, I'm still paying a lot each month for the server so I decided that if things haven't improved by the end of this month I'm going to completely remove the forum from my website and just have the articles. Then I can move the website onto a shared server which will be around £100 a year rather than £82 a month which is what I am paying at the moment.

What's really rather irritating is my nearest rival has almost dropped off the map. Our two main keywords were always very close together in the search listings. My main keyword is at number three on Google.com whilst they have dropped to number 11 on Google for the same keyword. My only guess is that our particular niche is not as popular as it was. After all, my competitor started back in 1998 and the niche was really hot and stayed like that for quite a long time. I suppose people move onto other things and probably won't stay with the same niche for ever which is why I'm seeing such a difference.

[MayankParmar]

Google's Chrome update should kill all popup ad networks, but Propeller is already prepared :D

[NeapTide]

They have no need to do this. If they wanted to get rid of small sites and low earning publishers from Adsense they could just raise the bar - exactly the same as they have done with YouTube. They could easily introduce a minimum number of page views and unique visitors for Adsense monetisation, the same way as they have introduced a 4,000 hour per year minimum watch time and minimum of 1,000 subscribers for YouTube. I don't believe the top people at Google lose much sleep over the plight of their publishers. If they want to get rid of publishers they will just do it and not resort to making the programme so bad that people leave voluntarily.

@Jaideemaak there is a difference between YouTube and your personal sites. You personal sites do not plagiarize a Google owned property nor your sites burden Google servers. If someone just keep publishing useless videos that no one watches the videos will just waste storage space at YouTube servers. That will cost YouTube money. While the crappiest self hosted website out there is more favorable for google to display ads than YouTube. Google usually do not approve Blogger hosted sites easily unless there is some really cool stuff on that. They usually prefer self hosted sites. But these days Google is rarely approving new publishers. Product forums is flooded with threads from people who applied for Adsense but never heard back from Google. So they do have raised bar for Adsense for content too.