If it weren´t for MFA´s, my income would be zero!

Do I hear a trace of irony here?

My September is slightly disappointing given BackToSchool August.

Maybe with lower gas prices people are visiting malls again. I posited the inverse theory when gas prices rose and I suspect the same people will appear to dispute it. I don't want to have that debate again. Just ponder my unsupported premise, it may have some merit.

If you don't promote Halloween mdse (I do) I guess you'll just have to behave and wait for Santa. :)

Depends on your niche.

My stuff is trivia - stuff to fill the long cold winter evenings .... things are picking up nicely after the summer doldrums.

Well what do you expect - we get all the "recycled" ads.

:-p

Ok

State your niche(s) and if your traffic/profits are up or down normally or abnormally or statis quo for this time of year.

Free Presentation Graphics, normally up^

[edited by: Khensu at 6:30 pm (utc) on Sep. 23, 2006]

Apparel flat in September, except costumes.

My sites are forums so written by kids oin the school holidays, the back to school syndrome and removal of buckets of stuff I spotted that breached my and googles t&cs caused a slight early September slump, but it was more a mild cold than a bout of the flu.

Travel/hotels

Normally down this time of year.

It is currently down from Summertime, however, I am doing better than last year.

money - damn competitive. september started like a snail in slow motion, but picked up. seems like i'm in a niche that will be good all year round as long as Google serps like me.

Had my worst day since 26/11/2005 (revenue wise) this Saturday (on a travel related site). I was wondering if the maintenance had something to do with it (very low ad impressions, plus sub-average EPC)?

I think the articles on click fraud in magazines and newspapers are affecting Adsense advertising budgets

It's probably just seasonal in most cases.

I've been working on eliminating MFAs from my AdSense ads using the competitive ad filter and Google's AdSense Preview Tool for IE. While it might seem counterintuitive, I've seen quite a bit of discussion that MFAs might actually be depressing earning. If nothing else low paying AdSense ads for MFAs may be bleeding off clicks from better paying ads for legitimate sites and they may be causing such a negative impact on the experience of users who click on AdSense ads that they reduce the likelihood of users clicking on AdSense ads in the future.

It's hard to imagine that the magazine hit pieces did not affect some naive ad managers.

My AdSense is very bad today, though there does seem to be an updation lag. Yesterday began very badly but ended about average so there's still hope for today.

advertisers pay big bucks for search results clicks and save on content probably.
why should one show ads in the search network if cant control them properly?

One other possible factor.

Adwords appears to be applying landing page quality scores to those advertising on content now.

This likely will result in fewers ads for your site and therefore less competition and lower bids.

This will likely affect MFA advertisers but may trickle over to some legit advertisers too.

If it weren´t for MFAs, my income would be zero!

Something's wrong here. My site's ads are extremely well-targeted, even in some very esoteric, technical niches. Could your pages have the kind of content that generates wide-ranging, "one size fits all" ads?

I filter out every MFA site I find. It's my highest priority in my time spent working on AdSense. I just put myself in the position of an informed visitor to my site, and try to provide what they would benefit the most from. And they click.

Second call: Sailorjwd, your sticky mail box is full.

My niche, back issue magazines, plus sports, particularly football. PVs, CTR, eCPM and Earnings up overall, though weekends are killers. My content drives traffic all week and I suspect my visitors are busy watching games on weekends. The huge impact of football in the US is likely a measurable event on the net.

Anything relating to men should see a noticable dip on Saturdays and especially Sundays, with smaller blips on Thurday and Monday nights.

I definitely see this. Your mileage will surely vary.

My specialist construction products normally have a good run through until the end of November by which time Joe Public has decided he can't get it done before Xmas, and the trade decides that it does not want to carry any unnecessary stock over the Xmas period and into the potentially worse weather period...then they go crazy in February expecting immediate delivery of everything...it's like Groundhog Day every year!

Just glanced back at last september, it was pretty appalling but what was especially notable was that I was showing far more adverts and doing proportionately far far worse!

Although my eCPM always goes down by 20% - 50% in Sept. from its summer highs, my earnings always double or better in Sept. and Oct due to a significant increase in seasonal traffic.

People need to remember that even if their sites don't experience much of a shift in the fall that there is a major shift in Internet traffic patterns every fall as students in the Northern Hemisphere go back to school and the peak vacation time comes to an end. People who in July may have been playing outside are now inside sitting at desks researching stuff on line for work or school and this creates a massive surge in traffic. Many sites like mine can see 400% - 500% increase in traffic in the fall from summertime levels. This means that we are displaying many times for ads and delivering many times more clicks. This surge in traffic in turn depresses CPC rates due to the increased supply of clicks.

Come April and May the trend will reverse itself as classes end and people start taking more vacations.

It all depends on your niche, where some have summer highs I have summer lows and Sept. was a real nice bounce back for me and it'll be up, but not peaking for Xmas. My peak months are right AFTER Xmas for about 4 months, very high in the spring.

The rest of the year is OK buy Jul/Aug are usually the worst as people actually seem to go on vacation or just go outside away from the computer and have a life - HOW DARE THEY!

[edited by: incrediBILL at 5:31 pm (utc) on Sep. 27, 2006]

Come April and May the trend will reverse itself as classes end and people start taking more vacations.

Maybe in the USA however definitely not Europe...too early for many to even consider vacations and peak revision time prior to school examinations etc.

It all depends on your niche, where some have summer highs I have summer lows and Sept. was a real nice bounce back for me and it'll be up, but not peaking for Xmas. My peak months are right AFTER Xmas for about 4 months, very high in the spring.

The rest of the year is OK buy Jul/Aug are usually the worst as people actually seem to go on vacation or just go outside away from the computer and have a life - HOW DARE THEY!

Even if a site has a niche that doesn't see the fall seasonal traffic fluctuation we are talking about, they are still affected by the seasonal fluctuations of the Internet as a whole. In Sept. traffic across the Internet in general starts to seriously increase. This naturally increases the supply of page views to display ads on and increases the supply of clicks on ads. This increase supply will naturally decrease the cost per click unless there is a balancing increase in demand for clicks (which usually isn't the case).

Maybe in the USA however definitely not Europe...too early for many to even consider vacations and peak revision time prior to school examinations etc.

The drop off starts in april because of smaller holidays (e.g. Easter and spring break). The full drop off doesn't hit until the end of May beginning of June. For me June and July totally suck. Although my eCPM will double my traffic is so low that I make only about 1/3 of the AdSense revenue in these months that I can make in October.

My niche is mathematics.

The August and September stat has saw a healthy bounce from the depressive June and July. MFA filtering actually works, with the increase on average EPC.

September is special, since for the first time my daily earnings did not deviate much from the monthly average except for the drop in September 23rd (the start of Ramadhan). Steady earning is better than a roller coaster ride.

[edited by: jatar_k at 1:38 am (utc) on Sep. 28, 2006]

Maybe we're beginning to see the beginning of a recession in the U.S. and therefore businesses are spending less on advertising. I tend to think it's a combination of G being G and a broader based slowdown.

The 16 Fed rate hikes are just beginning to hit the economy, price of gas is still much higher than we're used to ... etc.

I just took at look at today's stats from last year.

Most notable was that CTR has dropped by 50%.

Only about a 10% reduction in EPC.

Visitors down by 50% due to adwords issues.

Revenues down about 70%.

Are you happy now Adwords & Adsense?

Are you happy now Adwords & Adsense?

In general I am happy with AdSense although I think Google could do a little bit better job of weeding out MFA sites from ads that display on our sites and eliminating MFA sites from the AdSense program in general.

Finding that we can increase our eCPM by adding MFA sites to our competitive ad filter is kind of disturbing. It means we don't always get the highest bidding ads for our site rather Google may be farming out the cheaper ads to us and keeping higher paying ads to themselves. This is not how Google sells AdSense to publishers.

Google has continually told us that while we can add domains to our competitive ad filter this could reduce our revenue by reducing the supply of advertisers for our site. Yet many of us are finding that by blocking MFA sites our revenues are increasing. It really makes one wonder.