April 2018 AdSense Earnings & Observations

[Ironside]

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System: The following 18 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adsense/4889486.htm [webmasterworld.com] by martinibuster - 6:42 pm on Apr 1, 2018 (utc -5)

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I am up to 14 clicks with a 12p CPC so far today. But it's still early afternoon in the US so hopefully, things will get slightly better. At least marchers earnings were a lot better than January's.

@May Is it possible to work out how many clicks were disabled.

[surfgatinho]

CPC has gone off a(nother) cliff the last few days. It was bad enough and now it is down another 30%. Seems to be holding up on my site with plenty of US visitors ~£0.22, but my quality UK sites are around £0.11

Overall average is £0.13 - never been this low before...

[MayankParmar]

21st of April and still no improvements, this has never happened before :(

[RedBar]

Friday saw my 3rd lowest PVs of 2018 only beaten by New Year's Day and Easter Sunday, in fact:

Sunday 15th was 4th lowest
Saturday 14th was 9th lowest
Wednesday 18th was 12th lowest
Tuesday 17th was 16th lowest

Out of 110 days, 5 of my lowest-ever PVs have been in the last 7 days.

Great G, after 20 years my sites are suddenly unrewarded and replaced by utter garbage, totally irrelevant sites and an algo that blatantly disfavours non-US businesses.

[Mentat]

If you check the oficial Adsense google forum, you can see the disaster!
A lot of complains of not approved sites and much lower revenue from Youtube creators.

So, there are is a big problem with AdSense for content. AdSense for search is going great, but I have a bad feeling that there is a chance that google will close Adsense for content. Too much trouble.

[NeapTide]

I sometimes answer question at Google product forums and I can say it for sure for past couple of months, Google is not approving new AdSense accounts. Very rarely they are approving new applications.

Google's big share of revenue comes from AdSense from content. There is no way they would "close" AdSense for content.

[MayankParmar]

I can confirm that too, Google has either strengthened the rules or has stopped approving application.

[Travis]

Certainly to discourage people creating clickbait sites, which are trying to earn big money fast before disappearing.

[MayankParmar]

Is it okay to use a large 640x300 AdSense link ad? Spotted such a ad on some sites, and I thought this against the TOS.

[edited by: MayankParmar at 7:34 pm (utc) on Apr 21, 2018]

[abrsh]

yup @casanova it dropped for me too this entire month. its half of the income i get with same impression. and one of my friend told me the same thing even cancellation of clicks is getting worse. if this continues am shifting to mgid i guess. is there anybody who use mgid for your other sites? and how much in percent(-or+) is comparable with adsense?

[koan]

I'm glad to hear Google is getting stricter with accepting sites, I always thought they were too open and it tarnished the brand. It became a target for spammers, plagiarists and the get rich quick types

[MayankParmar]

I really hate native ads. More or less it shows fake news :) Haven't tried mgid yet.

[frankleeceo]

step 1: tightening account creation
step 2: close accounts without enough impressions like what they did with YouTube.

it'll be tougher and tougher to start in this game, if it isn't already tough enough.

hard to do a comparative note of my stats for the foreseeable future. doing quite a bit of change in my setup in terms of ad tech. but overall earning for the month of april is up.

[CommandDork]

I remember the Adsense program lowering standards a few years back and shaking my head when I heard the news. This did little but create sludge sites on the internet as any yahoo could set up a side hustle with it by just stealing content and using blogger or stepping up their game through WP.

Would love it if Adsense made itself into a premium program with strict entry requirements plus manual reviews. Good honest hardworking publishers, Google and advertisers will ALL be rewarded for it.

[abrsh]

some of you think that making a money from video is easy...but it is NOT! i spend a whole day making a video and don't get as much as i thought i would. Writing articles is difficult until its written....and siting around with a seo expecting visitors to come is pretty easy. You can at least do something else while your money is pilling up. So don't tell me adsense for video is easy! If it is easy why dont you try making it and we will see how far you would go. NEEDS hard work every hour of your every day! Thank You! And we all are working hard to get rich! You dont have to be so old to be there.

[NeapTide]

@abrsh what kind of videos do you upload? It all depends how hot a niche is. Try increasing your Subscribers count and you will see the big change.

[Travis]

step 2: close accounts without enough impressions like what they did with YouTube.

They didn't close account at all.

[frankleeceo]

@Travis

I am predicting the future :). And I see step 2 as a very likely if not inevitable future within the next decade. Certain pushes in the past 6 months already reflect this mentality., ie. Brand safety and the way they crawl inventories. This will become more aggressive in the coming years.

They don't have to technically close accounts neither, but rather make "premium" tier where a bigger publishers get a slightly better pricing (think of it as reverse smart price). See the trends and prepare for the future is one of the best way to stay ahead. They're doubling down on the DFP and header bidding front, the hints have been dropped almost everywhere. ads.txt being the most obvious one towards the marketplace push.

The focus will be dropping the smaller publishers on their own (or simply tell those to use "autoads" and go from there), and opting to shift more resources to help out middle sized ones to compete with humongous publishers.

[MayankParmar]

They didn't close account at all.

Yep, and that restriction should not affect the smart kids. All they need to do is buy fake subscribers and upload 20 hours long unlisted video, and watch it lol.

[Travis]

I am predicting the future :).

No, you said they already did it at Youtube. But they didn't close anything.

[RedBar]

For whatever reason Google may have, my sites have been blown into oblivion, 99.99% obliterated.

From various updates I've gone from 100,000 PVs per day to yesterday's 207 and so far today after nearly half a Googleday, 47 PVs, yes forty-seven.

Gone, I see no reason nor rhyme as to why, they're 100% corporate white hat sites all with original text and images, nevertheless Google's update this week has seen fit to reward total garbage in the SERPs and US companies everywhere in all G.tlds.

The only possible reasons I can see is because they are all international sites, hosted in the UK, on .coms, a .co.uk hotel site I run has been totally unaffected ... so far!

This is a forewarning for all of you, ensure you have a plan B, C, D and E in place because, if you have not, here is evidence of just how quickly Google can wipe you out.

If it is an unintended effect of localisation, then someone at The Plex needs to get it sorted rapidly.

[frankleeceo]

@Travis

Ok I misspoke you are right. They did not close accounts outright, that's 100% correct. I shall clarify and spell it out since the spirit of my thinking is debated by exact language used :). By raising the bar on the minimum monetization requirement, they disallowed earning for publishers who do not meet the requirement.

A non earning account is the same as closed in my dictionary, at least temporarily. If the bar is raised high enough, the mass majority of accounts will become non earning. And it is never a "fixed" bar. The trend is that the bar will be raised higher in the future with more stringent requirements, even if certain people have learned how to game the system. And the trend is that this tactic will be carried out to other parts as well such as Adsense for Content.

They don't have to close any accounts, just make mass of them non earning. Soon enough non earning accounts go inactive, and in about 2~3 years they could close it through inactivity. It's just timing and language and how you read into the grand scheme of things.

I don't know about you. But I am scared as hell.

[NeapTide]

the standards were raised for youtube because it's a google's property with a monopoly today. everybody rushes towards youtube whether it's publishers or advertisers or typical users. while in contents section there is competition present. people could even choose direct advertising over adsense.

by the way if you are getting traffic you will make the money.

[MayankParmar]

I feel like the two header-bidding ads powered by PubGalaxy are taking away AdSense earnings by a good margin :/ I'm not able to figure out :/

[Kash1111]

Native ads are not too bad, we have an average rpm of $1.50 with good amount of traffic its a good earner, over 5% ctr is not too bad. Mind you the website is a general niche with many categories.

April is not too bad, good rpm, high cpc.

Edit: I closed the adsense account you all should be happy now :)

[MayankParmar]

@Kash1111 It pays as much as AdSense?

[MayankParmar]

The experiment that Google is running for Link Ads is affecting the CTR in a negative way and it actually doesn't seem to be a experiment anymore, I'm seeing all of them time on all sites. Seeing same report on other forums. Anyone?

[nomis5]

By raising the bar on the minimum monetization requirement, they disallowed earning for publishers who do not meet the requirement

.

I didn't even realise there was such a bar. I know if you don't earn x amount you won't be paid that month but it still gets rolled up and combined with next month's earnings.

Can you give more detail about the bar and how it is implemented?

[frankleeceo]

[support.google.com...]

That quote was about Adsense for YouTube. My read on it is that it may be rolled to adsense for content sometime in the future, eventually. It may be implemented differently but all with the same goal in mind. The exact "bar" is just details and nuisances which will probably be drawn from some type of big data analysis to weed out the weakest.

I try to read and predict trends, and act accordingly to respond towards potential weaknesses in my business, instead of being surprised when #*$! happens. I believe that is the smart approach. This is all speculation based on the various "things" that have been introduced into the system during recent months.

[Travis]

The thing is, with Youtube, Google knows exactly how many views, and subscribers. This is not the same for a web site. Excepting if you are using Google Analtycs, Google can't tell how many page views you have. Also, nothing says that you are displaying adsense to all your visitors. The Adsense code can be put in concurrence with other ad networks. So, having 100 Adsense page views, doesn't mean, you have only 100 pave views in reality. Or, Adsense might force publishers to display Adsense on at least 100 page views /days (example) in order to get paid...

Also, and with respect to Youtubers, I don't think you can compare the quality (from an advertiser point of view) of a web site and a video. So I don't think you can measure the performance of a web sites to only its numbers of views. Some will have "only" 1000 visitors and generate like $5 or $10, while others can have 10.000 and generate only $1 or $2. All depend of the content of the site, the profile of it's visitors, it's niche and so on.

Personally, I think that, if there is restriction to make, this would more be about the age of the site, and the evolution of it's traffic. Like for example, they might require a site to be at least one year old to be able to apply.

[NeapTide]

I launched a new site and put AdSense code two weeks ago. Earning $ 0.00 - 0.10 per day. Traffic for now 500-1000 pageviews per day. Most of the site pages are still displaying Ads from third party ad networks