December 2019 AdSense Earnings & Observations

Let's see how December goes!

[kireb]

November, high season for me, turned out to be the worst month of the year for me. My pageviews increased by 20% year to year, but RPM was very low.

November is the 1st month this year that sees a lower revenue than the same month last year.

Somrthing happened around October 17th, as my active view viewable stats started to decline. This decline is still going on and I feel that the loading time of the ads is to blame for this. The adsense ads load about 1 second after the page content.

I have seen several odd things last month, such as the Serp snippets displaying my cookie banner text. I had ads in Turkish, German and other weird languages, or quite often no ads at all on dynamic pages.

My Uk RPM is, already for 2 months, lower than that of India, which also makes no sense to me.

Too many oddities for me to figure out whats happening to my site and adsense ads. I hope it will bounce back and I will keep producing quality content.

[edited by: not2easy at 4:04 pm (utc) on Dec 1, 2019]
[edit reason] <moved from Nov Thread> [/edit]

[gatormark]

So, two of my websites are in the same niche. One gets 1/5 the traffic of the other, yet HALF of the revenue. The only difference, the site with 1/5 the traffic and half the revenue has link units. Man, I hope they keep displaying those link units.

[delorean]

Anyone having error issue with ads.txt. Adsense keeps on displaying that I need to upload ads.txt, though my ads.txt was there at all time. Maybe its a message bug from Adsense? wanna hear your thoughts guys. thank you.

[MrJefe]

@delorean
Make sure you don't have inactive domains listed in your adsense account. Removing my obsolete domains from my approved domain list resolved that for me a while back.

[Nightmute]

I have a subdomain pointer in an ads.txt file and my adsense pub id in the destination ads.txt file.

The adsense console still hasn't figured out that this is a proper use case and continues to show a worthless red warning message for the parent domain.

It aggravates me because if ads.txt happens to break on one of my other sites, the warning system is useless since I constantly have a false positive.

[ember]

My matched content block, which usually shows 8 to 10 or so little blocks of content with links to pages in my site, interspersed with a few ads, is now showing one ginormous video ad. That's not what matched content is supposed to be!

[MayankParmar]

Link ads on Display ad units and display ad on link ad units. Lol

[breeks]

I removed my matched content block - half the time it did not show up and there was a large blank space. Used to work well - but not lately.

[gatormark]

Looks like Adsense is back to taking money away. Every other time I look at my numbers today, it is less than the previous time I looked at it.

[gatormark]

USA CPM and CPC have dropped considerably in the last 2 days.

[Mentat]

Christmas is upon us, at the mall, you cannot find a parking space, but online is quiet.
As usual, I get -50% on eCPM on week-ends.

[CommandDork]

This thread use to be hopping, and with so many different names. Times are changing I guess.

[Mentat]

No. the times are changed already! We are a bunch of old people complaining about an old system.

Now Video is the new king, for people that don't know how to write/read!

[skaterpunk]

This thread use to be hopping, and with so many different names. Times are changing I guess.

I used Adsense for 8 years, and for the most part the income was stable and allowed me to focus on content, but over the past year the income dropped off a cliff and I chased my tail trying to figure out why for the better part of a year. Once Adsense continued to barely cover my hosting fees, month over month, I couldn't justify using it anymore. The extra code bloat, speed lag, and questionable quality of ads, isn't worth the trade-off.

[MayankParmar]

December isn't looking good :(

[gatormark]

Many people are wondering why Adsense is not performing as well as in past years. One, just one, of the reasons is increased competition from other Advertising networks. For instance, I am getting almost the same amount of income from Exponential as I am from Adsense. In the past Adsense dominated them, but now Exponential performs better. Obviously, there are other factors, but competition for Adsense is one of the primary reasons for the decline of income if you are only relying on Adsense. My Adsense revenue is down 16% from last December and has been declining every year since 2017. However, because I supplement with Exponential, my overall revenue is higher than December of last year. In fact, now, most of my USA ad income comes from Exponential, because they focus on the USA. Food for thought.

[allhearts]

Last month (Nov) was not to bad, this month however is not looking good, although I have always done well on December.

[allhearts]

For the record, every time I turn on Automatic Experiments, I notice a big drop in earnings, checked this morning and it was on, turned it off so will see how it goes, Google must of prompted me to turn it on, cause I sure don't remember doing it.

[Mentat]

Last two days the traffic was kind of low, but the payment is incredibly low.
I was hopping for a record month in December after a record last week, but it seems that is not a trend.

[azlinda]

I have given 100% of my site advertising to Ezoic, and I couldn't be happier. Why, oh why, didn't I do this sooner! I have a wonderful account manager there also.

[azlinda]

@Mentat LOL about video for those who can't read or write. There are many people who won't even look at a recipe unless it has a picture with it. How times have changed!

[Matador86]

So you recommend using Ezoic? hmmm, maybe I should give it a try as well.
By how much did you earnings improve?

[ember]

I tried Ezoic and lost money. It doesn’t work for every site.

[azlinda]

@Matador86 My earnings tripled! And they are still on the way up.

[Matador86]

triple? holy sh*t, what niche are you in?

[azlinda]

@Matador86 - I'm in the culinary niche. Ezoic says that your income may double or triple.

[Mentat]

Lowest earnings this year, we still have some days this year.

[leebow]

I’m considering putting an “advertise on this site” link on my site - and selling ads directly.

Anyone got any advice on this? What you’ve charged, how you manage the ads, etc - any tips for someone looking to move away from Adsense.

[Mentat]

Back pre-adsense era?
It was misery, but seems to be the future for most of the sites.

[Steven29]

"Ensure text remains visible during webfont load".

Does anybody know how to do this for Adsense? It seems the "Default" font has been removed from many ad formats and there are always different types of font's that load on the screen. Sometimes there are two font families and it loads differently as bold, regular, bold italic etc depending on the ad that is shown.

How can I prevent/fix/optimize this? Some speed tests reports are showing up to 15 requests for Font Families for 3 ad units...


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[Runfun]

@Leebow use Google DFP or I believe it's called Ad Manager these days. I've said it a dozen times here but people only complain about Adsense and are to lazy to improve their ad serving.

This year my Adsense revenue will be low XX,XXX and almost halved compared previous year. Not only due to a decline in CPM but also because I'm serving much more affiliate ads and in house ads that are more than doubled compared to last year. Besides that I'm also using header bidding at Google Ad Manager and it gives me about +50% CPM compared to Adsense. Adsense seems to be dying but use Ad Manager to survive.