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 :(

[sdksjdksjd]

@ember
What amount of traffic do you get?

[ember]

I don't talk specifics but I don't get anywhere near what many people here get.

[Unshiny]

Just wanted to say that we agree with AZLinda and others who think the company is keeping more of the $ because they CAN.

What's that old truism....absolute power corrupts absolutely. Sigh.

[azlinda]

Now Google is the arbiter of what is an offensive word! Unbelievable! I detest them more each passing day.

[nomis5]

Absolute power corrupts, agreed.

But if you examine the very limited number of posters to this thread, understand that you are receiving a hugely miniscule viewpoint.

Those who are doing OK by Adsense may well not be posting here because they feel embarrassed by those posters who are posting bad news. For me;

2016 v 2017 year on year, income was up by 32% for my main site.

2017 v 2018 to date, income was up by 26% for my main site.

It's not an easy way to make money, and I would urge extreme caution for newcomers, but for established participants in the Adsense market, doom and gloom is not as prevalent as this thread might suppose.

[ember]

Unshiny, what does it say in your account about how much you receive? Are you saying that Google publically says it pays 68% but actually pays less? Could it be that advertisers are paying less per click because there is increased competition (Pinterest, FB, Twitter, etc.) for ad dollars? For years Adwords was the only game in town. Now it has a lot of competition.

Consider my own situation. I am an advertiser in another area. I used to spend all my ad dollars on Bing and Google. Then Pinterest rolled out its advertising platform, and I found that it worked better than either Adwords or Bing. So I moved my money to Pinterest. One less advertiser using Adwords. Multiply that by thousands of advertisers putting ad dollars elsewhere while publisher inventory keeps growing. The ad prices are going to drop, leading to lower epc prices for publishers.

It is probably niche-specific. Some niche advertisers have probably found that they have a better ROI on FB, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. than Adwords. If you are in one of those niches, then your old Adwords' advertisers might be going elsewhere, which would explain lousy ads and low epc.

[sdksjdksjd]

Guys, no offence, but when you say "Everything is up." and then appears, that your traffic is not "anywhere near what many people here get", then your input is useless.
Same as "2016 v 2017 year on year, income was up by 32% for my main site."
Up from $1000?
What was before 2016?
"my main site" - are you traffic hunter, seeking for the Google algo vulnerabilities in hope to suck another couple of bucks from it?

Really guys, if you are an IT pro, then you should understand, that small measurements can't be considered as statistically proven.
Two years online? Traffic is in low figures? Up 50% from $100? - you are dealing with fluctuations, that can't be the base for any, even small, solutions. This is just scientifically wrong. So again, no offence.

Please write at least a note (like "though my figures are low"). Respect others time. Thanks)

[kegnum]

@nomis5 my income is stable.. meaning i am earning the same or more than i was in previous years as well.. the issue is that i am earning 30% as much per visitor and that this change happened over night and has shown no improvement. (no change in theme, traffic or any other factor that would mean it happened on my end).

If i were to lose 10% of my rpm a year over time.. i would assume my traffic wasn't converting.. but since it literally happened over the course of a week or so.. I can only assume that google is either keeping a bigger share, they are serving irrelevant ads, some other manipulation or just F'ing up in general.

There is no scenario, in my mind, where google is not manipulating something, in some way.

I should also say that I run a site for my sister, under her adsense account. It is in a different niche and gets very little traffic. She makes around $500 a month from it. It's hard to use her site/adsense account to compare as the traffic is so minuscule.

I am happy for all who are having good months. That said, its not the drop in income that most of us are upset with or confused about, though I'm sure it's not pleasant, its the way it happened.

If google can randomly lower what they pay you per average visitor over night (whether it be by reducing CPC or CTR) and with no explanation, you lose almost all trust in the company.

Not to mention all the weird "bugs" that seem to be popping up constantly in the last 10 months. (Aprils rpm bug, 1099s to old addresses, account verification bug, blank ads, zloans and others). All this seems to point to the fact that google is loosing control and its unnerving.

[kegnum]

Also, saying your income is up 30% is a meaningless statistic... Is your traffic up... If your income with adsense is up 30% but your traffic is up 50%.. guess what, you are being paid less. Sharing one part of the equation does not help to answer any questions.

[ember]

sdksjdksjd, no info shared here is useless, and I'm fairly sure that what is shared is not up to you. I also learned long ago not to talk specifics about my business. And BTW, I am not a guy.

[Jaideemaak]

The only unit that seems to work for me these days is the responsive link ad, but that too has gone very quiet recently. Link ads remain fairly contextual, whereas most ad units bear no relationship to the subject of my site whatsoever. Most of my site is travel-related and hotels play a big part in travel, but who is going to click on a link that says 'Cheap Hottels' (sic)? This just about sums up the quality of the Adsense programme these days. My six year-old daughter can spell 'hotel' in the two languages that she speaks, but someone - presumably an adult - can't even manage the English spelling.

I'm just waiting for a few more cents to get to the minimum payment amount so that I can remove Adsense ... once again. However, what I used to make in no time at all now takes forever, so this may take a while. After I reinstated Adsense a couple of months ago for a renewed attempt I've had one or two good days, but overall it has been dismal. I'm going back to having solely affiliate links. Results with these aren't as good as they used to be, but at least they are relevant for visitors to my site and they pay significantly more than Adsense.

[sdksjdksjd]

@ember
If info shared here wouldn't be useless, then this place wouldn't be dead.

[Unshiny]

Our experience was very like kegnums, in a nutshell. All of the sudden earnings fall...and never recover. We have been online since 2002 and with adsense since 2009. Our traffic is stable (very slight downturn...around a 1percent drop)...income dropped by close to 50 percent. Overnight. I thought at first it was the coverage issue that people had in late Jan...but we did not have that problem and a month later our earnings are still very low.


Yes it may very well be niche specific. But it comes across as though they simply decided to devalue our site/niche overnight. And there is no recourse, they hold all the cards. We are in a very narrow niche...about 40k page views daily.

So, yeah, stuff happens. Nobody said it would last forever. But the way this has gone....feels crappy. We are revisiting affiliate stuff and sending some impressions to media net.

[sdksjdksjd]

@Unshiny
This is not niche specific.
I'm in the same boat and my 10+ years old website is consumer related - means no specific niche.

[ember]

sdksjdksjd, if it is so useless and dead here, then why do you stay?

[frankleeceo]

For the ones that experienced drastic drop in RPM, what was the before and after number?

[HugoEgon]

-32% the last 2 days

[MayankParmar]

-42% last 7 days, pageviews +28%, fair isn't it? ;) Also, Adx is up 10% than normal days (December).

[child please]

To the dude who claims that Google is somehow keeping more than their publicized 32% share is ridiculous. Seriously, if your earnings are lower, it is because you are not adapting to the changing landscape of internet advertising. Just because your traffic goes up doesn't mean your revenue will go up if you are comparing 2018 to 2015 or 2016.

I made $3k more in January 2018 than I did in January 2015 and my traffic in 2018 was almost 25% lower than it was in 2015.

Sorry, don't agree with these conspiracy theories.

[Maximum44]

@child please totally agree with you. I wish Google was more transparent though.

[MayankParmar]

@Child please I agree with you, I'm having bad phase since two months, but AdSense was great in 2017 :)

@Maximum How can they be more transparent? By showing the advertiser bid rate, our earnings and Google's earnings per click?

[nomis5]

Also, saying your income is up 30% is a meaningless statistic... Is your traffic up... If your income with adsense is up 30% but your traffic is up 50%.. guess what, you are being paid less. Sharing one part of the equation does not help to answer any questions.

That made me think, it even made me look at my stats. For 2017, earnings up 32%, page views up 41%. So that's a 9% variance. But as ember writes:

So I moved my money to Pinterest. One less advertiser using Adwords. Multiply that by thousands of advertisers putting ad dollars elsewhere while publisher inventory keeps growing. The ad prices are going to drop, leading to lower epc prices for publishers.

I would think that that is a good enough explanation - as good as any other and a lot better than the one given below in my opinion.

They're changing the % that us publishers receive per click.

In reply to

What was before 2016?

The answer is we are now in 2018, who cares what happened in 2015? The whole market place has changed so much in three years that the comparison is meaningless.

"my main site" - are you traffic hunter, seeking for the Google algo vulnerabilities in hope to suck another couple of bucks from it?

I have a couple of legacy sites which I have not touched for a couple of years. I'm not searching for additional traffic from them, I let the traffic decrease. They are crap websites because they haven't been updated for so long. I only keep them for personal reasons. And as for trying to game the Google algo, that's absurd. The algo is so complicated and changing that I, for one, wouldn't spend any time trying to understand it.

small measurements can't be considered as statistically proven.

That depends on your definition of small. Consistency also must come into the equation as well as volume. When I see a % movement in earnings for February 2018 to date, and see roughly the same % movement over the entire year for 2017, I come to the conclusion that my February figures are statistically reliable. For my website at least.

I go back to my original point; for some, earnings and / or page views are going one way and for others they are going in a different direction. That's always been true. I just think the overall direction cannot be determined by reading the comments in this thread.

[Maximum44]

@MayankParmar definitely advertisers individual bid rate.

[NeapTide]

@unshiny and others, Never object on Google's legitimacy and their honesty or if you do Google police (die hard fan publishers) will come defend the company. I mean who are you to object on what they might be doing? After all the big G is your God father.

On a side note and after a great excuse from G Police, 68% to 67% or less for publishers and 32% to 33% or more for Big G will make a huge impact on the monthly revenue of multi-billionaire company having millions of publishers today. But hey who am i to speculate?

[steviec79]

I see the trolls have climbed on board. I'm logging off the thread now, but good luck to the sensible posters who have a bit about them (which obviously doesn't include the child 'dude').

[NeapTide]

How can they be more transparent? By showing the advertiser bid rate, our earnings and Google's earnings per click?

Seems like you never saw clicks and earnings getting reversed in the name of invalid clicks and at the end of month another cut in the name of invalid clicks. Two times cut in the name of invalid clicks but "transparency" rocks like they show you the transaction where money was actually reversed to advertisers account with "100% honesty" and not to the G's accounts. [no offence intended]

[Peter_S]

The only unit that seems to work for me these days is the responsive link

Since ad links are not directly showing advertisers on the publisher' site, it might not fall into the advertisers protection things which involves the Adsense bot to first verify if a page is okay before displaying advertisers.

[sdksjdksjd]

@child please
How many ad blocks do you have per page? Links and text/links.
Is your traffic mostly targeted or mass traffic, like funny pics, for example?

[kegnum]

I don't necessarily think that Google is paying less of a share of the ad revenue... Google is a complex company and that is an over simplified explanation. I do however think that google might be marking sites/adsense accounts a certain way and showing less profitable ads.

Like I said many times before a sudden drop in revenue, overnight (we are talking 50%+), is not natural.

You're right, it's not 2015.. but we can use previous years to judge seasonal drops and for me personally, I have never had a drop so big that lasted so long.

If my traffic was poorly preforming, I would assume I would have warnings and a large percentage of invalid clicks.. but that is not the case.. I have gotten 1 warning in 10 years and it was trivial.

My invalid click traffic is anywhere from 0.25% to 1%... that doesn't sound like there is a problem with my traffic.

Yet the last week in September my CTR dropped almost 50% and my CPC drop 10%+. Not to mention the fact I am seeing ads that don't match my content.

On top of that, When i visit other sites I am seeing irrelevant ads.

When I visited a competitor's site this morning I say three identical ad blocks about menstruation... I am a 37 year old man. I used to see ads about business and amazon products I was interested in.. haven't seen those in months.

Interestingly enough, Facebook is still showing me ads I would be interested in.

As I said before, I am very glad some of you are doing well, or at least haven't dropped as far as others, but in my mind something is definitely up with google lately.

[sdksjdksjd]

@ember
Since 2010, when the last algo crack happened here, this is the whining place. So I'm here to whine, but unintentionally trying to get something useful even from such place.