So, I've been out of the Adsense game for the last couple of years, but when using it previously, I had a site in the education niche, and would reliably get over $100 Impression RPM, with CPC in the 1 to 2 dollar range, with just one unobtrusive ad on each page. This made for great user satisfaction and still made me a good deal of income. I come back now, and the results are just awful, like $12 Impression RPM, CPC down in like $0.16 to $0.30 cents range. Like... what in the ever loving world? Then I read that last year Google switched to CPM bids, doing away with CPC. Sure enough, I look at my past data and what used to be 99% CPC is now 100% CPM. Fantastic.
What did this make me do, now that impressions alone are king? Introduce a radically new site design that has many more ads per page, and stretches content across multiple pages unnecessarily, to encourage users to view multiple pages to get the content they want, simply so I could come close to the revenue the CPC model would make me in the past.
The CPM change obviously makes for much worse user satisfaction, and worse site design, because there are a lot more ads, and more pages to sort through.
Which leads me to believe this change was introduced simply to increase Google's overall ad inventory. If the the natural response is that publishers have to implement more ads, to offset the change, that's the only conclusion I can draw.
What a simply terrible change by Google. Whomever came up with the idea to switch is literally an enemy of world.
