May 2019 AdSense Earnings & Observations

[Mentat]

April 2019 was a kick in the teeth for most /some of us.

Easter (Catholic and Orthodox) and very low payment made April a very bad surprise.

May is here and it's starting with a non-working day (1st of May - International Workers' Day) in many countries.

Hope the best, expect the worst...

[trebuchet]

Interesting, thanks.

I looked at Mediavine a couple of months ago but got the impression their publishers were all food and cooking, mom-bloggers or finance/self-help. I applied for Adthrive instead and they approved me straight away. Still haven't done anything about it though as I need to change my site layouts to accommodate their units.

[nomis5]

Anyone else tried Mediavine?

[Runfun]

I've made an application for Mediavine, worse than Adsense is almost impossible these days. But lucky me I've received 4 applications from advertisers to advertise directly with banners, advertorials and affiliates. 2 of them messaged about their problems with advertising with Adwords so it's not only the publisher with problems with Google. Wish that more advertisers will advertise directly.

[Gracie]

I'm in the entertainment niche. I applied to Mediavine and Adthrive at the same time, Mediavine replied within a day asking for more stats and I never heard anything from Adthrive.

I have wanted to go with a CPM based ad company for a while as I get £1-2 with Adsense and was seduced by the income reports boasting of $10+ CPM. That would be life changing for me with my current traffic levels.

[gatormark]

Has anyone used Ezoic and what effect did it have on your earnings?

[Sissi]

Adsense is this week back to higher xx CPM at least for some niches and Europe.
Looks that the technical issues are over.

Quality content is a key not only for SEO but also for advertisers who deal with big ads budget.
Formula is simple: The more business you generate through your pages the more publishers will bid for your pages.

Given Google quasi monopoly on SEO and ads, I doubt any other competitor is able to deliver such an additional income.
Adsense despite bad times remains a reliable partner.
The problem is not Adsense but thousands of publishers who have contaminated this business.

[Runfun]

Ezoic no response here and with the bad user experience I noticed in comments it's a no go here.

[trebuchet]

There is a separate thread discussing publisher experiences with Ezoic. The general consensus seems to be that it earns better than Adsense but may affect UX.

This discussion reminded me that I had an Adthrive account on the table so I've started installing their ads on my Wordpress-based sites (easy since they have a proprietary plugin). I'll let you know how the earnings look in a few days. Ad placements are fairly aggressive (anchor ad at the bottom, one in the sidebar and 3-4 in the content) but the quality of the ads is good, no spammy download buttons.

[gatormark]

Thanks everyone...concerning Ezoic

[engineerqasim]

@Evan Salamanca Do they approve easily into their network?

[frankleeceo]

Always be careful about the boasting of unrealistic CPM's by adnetworks. You may soon find that $10 CPM will only give you 1% of the fill :).

My observation of RPM is that it is getting flatter. There are less and less noticeable rises and falls, except for a bigger surge for specific holiday.

[Mentat]

Well, for me weekend was really a new record bottom as revenue, but I’m the only one complaining here.
Monday was peomissing, but oynone day.
Tuesday is dead again.

It seems to be the new normal.

[Runfun]

No Mentat the weekend was horrible too but today I made an agreement with an advertiser to serve ads for a long period for a CPM of €8. Header bidding about €0,60 and Adsense about €0,35. So my new normal will be even less impressions for Adsense because it isn't worth it any more.

[gatormark]

@Mentat You are not the only one complaining it’s just that the rest of us are tired of complaining. My revenue is 40% of last year at the same time of year. May 2nd hit me hard. I thought it would recover but it hasn’t.

[trebuchet]

Always be careful about the boasting of unrealistic CPM's by adnetworks. You may soon find that $10 CPM will only give you 1% of the fill :).

I'm always wary of that. I've dealt with a couple of networks who delivered on their high CPM promises - but only because they disregarded two-thirds of my pageviews/traffic ("we use an algorithm to calculate real traffic", sure you do, buster).

In the case of Adthrive and Mediavine, however, it seems to be publishers doing the talking, @Evan above being a case in point. Anyway, time will tell from my perspective.

[Evan Salamanca]

MV’s approval traffic threshold seemed to be pretty low. Like 90,000 PVs a month or something. They have a private Facebook group for their publishers and RPMs are freely discussed over there, in the context of such things as optimizing, improving pagespeed, etc.

You don’t have to be food, mom blog or finance to join, they just tend to be the ones who gravitated in for some reason. You can be basically any topic that Adsense or other networks will accept (eg. not pr0n or warez)

[Runfun]

Instead of ads sometimes I see this: googleInitIc(document.body,'10,10,10,10');

Good job Google :'-)

[Dimitri]

Today, I have a message on top of the dashboard saying that some of my sites are missing the "ads.txt" file (with link to the page explaining how to set it up). However, I have only "one" site, (so "the some of my sites", might be a generic message), and secondly, the ads.txt file is present, accessible (tried from different sources) and correct.
(and only my site appears in the list of authorized sites, so even if someone else is using my code, this shouldn't be a problem)

Instead of ads sometimes I see this:

Ads became so complex, with js, redirect, ajax, etc, etc, that sometimes a single mistake in the code can produce this kind of output. I miss the time were ads were one image, one link.

[trebuchet]

@Dimitri, sometimes your ads appear on other sites (e.g. Google, Pinterest, Padlet, Stumbleupon) and those sites obviously don't carry your ads.txt.

Go to Sites > Overview to see where they might be appearing.

[Dimitri]

Thank you @trebuchet, this is what I checked, and as I mentioned my ad code is not showing anywhere else.

[Sissi]

Just got a message that April was - 25 % against March what wasn t new to me.
It says: Focus on your best-performing ads.

May is however far better than April.

[redsarden]

Strange thing today my ads starting to shows googleInitIc(document.body,'10,10,10,10'); below the ads.
Hope the click is still recorded.

[frankleeceo]

"some of my sites are missing the "ads.txt" file". I have seen this for nearly an year :). Don't think I can get rid of them...

"Earnings at risk - One or more of your ads.txt files doesn't contain your AdSense publisher ID. Fix this now to avoid severe impact to your revenue."
"We found your ad code on one or more sites that aren't on your Sites list. To avoid lost revenue, make sure you add all your sites to this list."
"One goal of Matched content is to increase user engagement. Your page RPM and other metrics might be affected by this increase.".

These three stickied messages are permanent features of my report.

[kireb]

Also here a RPM decline of 30% of lately, mostly US related. Hope it will re bounce soon.

[Dimitri]

These three stickied messages are permanent features of my report.

:)

The same way that Google is automating / optimizing themselves adwords campaigns, one day, Adsense will enforce the exclusive use of their auto ads :)

[gatormark]

Has anyone else's TRAFFIC declined because of the May 2 outage? My traffic seems to be down about 35% since May 2. It happened overnight. Was their an algorithm update too on that date? Obviously, my revenue has been greatly affected.

[umutege]

My revenue %40 drop since may 1. Not recovered yet

[Sissi]

Google SEO has got some huge problems yesterday and still not recovered yet.

[Sissi]

This is the source
[mobile.twitter.com...]

[MegaD]

Starting ~14 hours ago the ads on my site are no longer loading. Also, in Adsense dashboard the page views counter increases but the ad impressions counter has no activity. Anyone else having this problem?
Oh, what a joy May turns up to be.