"I suggest never placing all your eggs in one basket, they are more rainy days to come. "

hmm nice aLoT of impression waoo Sir very nice :)

My experience has been similar to yours. My content is 100% original and provided by me. No SEO stuff, save from keyword placement and lots of text on the main page.

An hour ago I received an email saying that they cut off my biggest website.

I have responded to them - frankly if they cut off my website, they'll have to cut everyone's off, too - and I'm scrambling to find alternatives.

So in my conclusion, Google Adsense has always remained a trusting company when it comes to consistency in quality control but lacks in inventory, CTR rates, CPM value, and overall pay per click value.

As the expression goes, "your mileage may vary." Google does a fine job of providing relevant ads on my site, and this year, average EPC has been the highest since 2004 (before the introduction of smart pricing, separate bidding for search and content ads, etc.). CTR is down--in part, because I'm giving more emphasis to display ads on my site these days--and that's had a negative impact on eCPM. (The current economic doldrums probably aren't helping, either--this may be a good time for brand-building, but it may not be the best time for direct-response advertising in many sectors.)

I agree with your "Don't put all of your eggs in one basket" warning, and to those who say "But there aren't any other eggs to put in the basket," I'd respond: "In that case, any problems you're having with AdSense are likely to be a symptom, not the cause."

That's alot of hits is 1,000,000.

As far as putting all your eggs in one basket (Adsense) is concerned I'm not so sure you would agree if you had my (average or not) eCPM. I get between 10,000 and 25,000 impressions on my top earning site and I earn more that enough to pay my bills. Say I have an average of 17,000 impressions a day throughout the year.

With your 1,000,000 page impressions managing to pay your bills, what would you think if Adsense paid you 58 times your current earnings (1,000,000 / 17,000)? At that rate you / I could retire in two years!

Here's the deal; you give me your 1,000,000 page impressions for 3 months. I'll give you my 17,000 page impressions for the next 3 months. We both keep our eCPMs. Deal?

Of this I am sure, if I had your page impressions and my eCPM, I would be putting all my eggs firmly in the Adsense basket.

so in your experience, what other baskets are good choice to put your eggs?

alot of hits is 1,000,000

The productivity of AdSense will vary a great deal depending on

- who those visitors are
- why they're on your site

Some audiences are worth a great deal more than others, both for the publisher and for the advertisers.

so in your experience, what other baskets are good choice to put your eggs?

It depends on your sector and traffic levels, but for my information site, display ads and affiliate links have worked quite well.

I am lucky enough to have paid for 1/5th of my total hosting bill for the past 5 years using AdSense (1 payment). I have only had Adsense on my website for 2 of those years though.

Finally, a thread that tries to repair the damaged impression of the Adsense program. I think, such a thread was badly missing here.

My CPM has dropped to literally nothing in the last years, my ctr has literally gone down the pan.

in my conclusion, Google Adsense has always remained a trusting company when it comes to consistency in quality control but lacks in inventory, CTR rates, CPM value, and overall pay per click value.

In MY conclusion, looking back at 3+ years with the program, I see - a wreck. "Consistency" is not a term that would come to my mind at all when thinking about "Adsense".

Instead I see an intransparent system that has virtually no controls for publishers, no meaningful statistics, very very little quality control, no customer service, and statistics that can only be called "random".

Recently, I also saw a dive in CTR and eCPM. For both values, I am on the very low levels that I saw when I began using Adsense, despite improved traffic. I attribute this to the ongoing economical crisis, but how can I know? Google just does not give me enough meaningful information to optimize the business.

Having said that, I would be deeply concerned if Adsense did NOT cover my hosting bills. And I am happy to not have to rely on Adsense for my daily living. With EPC, eCPM, and total revenue, being unpredictable, you simply can not build your life around Adsense.

Well, *I* can't. Others probably can.

Well guys after publishing my review of the last few years, i can at least say Adsense has started to dig itself out of the hole and start to get back to 2005/2006 revenue, I can't confirm if this is a network change or just my site niche or my site traffic and its quality in particular, all I can say is I've noticed this across the board of both Adsense and CPM at the same time, maybe the economical depression this last year has changed suddenly for the better and we're starting to feel stabilization in the whole online advertising economy, or its just a fluke and I'll soon be back to where I once wrote a 'stable' position.

I'm now in the process of speaking to marketing experts (meet up for that wonderful pint of course) to talk about a/b testing processes to increase my ROI and to increase my user sign-ups.

I suggest everyone uses a mix between CPC as a primary (above fold), and CPM (below fold) as a secondary method of making some cold hard cash on your impressions and quality control is applied to such so remember that.

CPM advertising company's are not at all stable, and your impression / quality makes all the difference, the more impressions and less quality clicks you send a cpm company the less they pay overall for every 1,000 visits, typically they'll begin around 1-2$ per 1,000 impressions (not unique, this could be repeat), but each unique impression is monitored, and so typically after a period of time if a unique visitor hits your site over 10 page views the quality of that visitor will be less and so in final run you'll only make the biggest cash yield from the initial visitors that contribute to the 1,000 impressions that they pay for, so a good consistence of unique traffic 24/7 is the best way to earn big $$$ and so the over all earnings will vary, some networks tell me to reduce the overhead of your advertisements to 10 page views per hour to limit any overhead of impressions that the user will just ignore blindly. For some of you the impression yield will be such a great income that limiting it only makes little anyway.

Enjoy Adsense + CPM and get a better overall website feel, i would also suggest throwing a few CPA's in at your targeted user data to try and sell them music/ or gender specific products but that depends on your niche and user base.

Every site is different, so I'd be reluctant to suggest a "one size fits all" formula. On my site, for example, CPM display ads have earned "above the fold" placement because they pay better than AdSense ads do. On other sites, such as social-networking sites, display-ad CPMS may be abysmal (one recent article said that MySpace display ads were earning CPMs in the 20-cent range, and another report said that the newspaper industry's average CPM for online display ads off the home page was about $1). You've got to try different things and see what combination of ad types and placement works best for you.

signor_john is right, every factor makes a difference to how things will go, in myspace case they have very poor cpm because its mostly a repeat visitor site whilst in smaller sites its fly by traffic, social networking is infact the hardest type of site to monetize because the repeat traffic slowly eats up the value and spits out 10-20 cent cpm for every 1000 views.

I'd say display ads and affiliate links are in the same basket with AdSense; they all depend on Internet traffic.

A different basket would be a brick and mortar business, interest and dividends, or a career in manufacturing, consulting or retail.

My point is that these baskets are hard won and no matter what you do you may wake up one day to find all your eggs in one basket. Diversification has its downside, you cannot pay full attention to one thing when you are diversified and divided attention means mediocrity and possible failure.

I don't have a solution here, I'm just lamenting the poor selection of baskets. Everything I've tried away from AdSense has performed less well and I'm left wondering if I would have been better off concentrating on just one thing and excelling.

I have suffered several catastrophic dropoffs in income with AdSense and am very aware of this problem.

I'd say display ads and affiliate links are in the same basket with AdSense; they all depend on Internet traffic.

Yeah, all websites and everything on the web itself are dependent on Internet traffic. Like everything in the Ocean is dependent on water. ;)

I don't have a solution here...

Are you sure about that?

I'm just lamenting the poor selection of baskets.

Learn to weave. ;)

...and no matter what you do you may wake up one day to find all your eggs in one basket.

Failure is ok. Usually means to move on to something else.

Diversification has its downside, you cannot pay full attention to one thing when you are diversified and divided attention means mediocrity and possible failure.

My experience disproves the contention that diversification leads to mediorcrity. There are ways to ease/streamline the management of multiple websites. Delegation of responsibilities is one of them, understanding the limits of how much can be done and focusing on core sites is another. Beyond that it's a matter of constantly testing the waters and seeing what has potential. I don't want to drag this discussion off topic but will say I've posted before on ways to diversify such as creating a schedule of focusing attention on old sites/new sites in order to build a diversified portfolio of sites that monetize different areas in different ways. It can be done, many here do it.

Diversification does not mean mediocrity. Many of my sites are regularly cited by major and minor news media (online and offline), blogs, and other websites both in the United States and internationally in English AND non-English languages. Many of my sites are so popular they receive natural links and citations in Hebrew, Arabic, Spanish, German, French, Chinese, Japanese and many other languages. I do not promote in any of those languages. It's simply a matter of quality content. In my conversations with other webmasters I understand that I am not the exception. ;)

Obviously not everyone can accomplish this and I don't assume that everyone can. I've mentored some people and watched them grow their business. I've mentored others and seen their careers grow in an entirely different direction, like providing services rather than building sites. We all have different temperaments that affects what we are able to do best. The key in my opinion is thrashing through the myriad options and finding the road most appropriate for you.

I strongly urge you to go to PubCon and meet other webmasters. Grow your support network. Get on Twitter, get people onto your IM network. Travel to get together with newfound friends. Give others aid. Accept help from others. This should be part of growing your business and maximizing your innate potential. You have talent. Discover the best way to deploy it.

Everything I've tried away from AdSense has performed less well and I'm left wondering if I would have been better off concentrating on just one thing and excelling.

You'd probably be better off identifying the site with the best potential and running with that.

Stating that AdSense and Affiliate programs don't work for you is one thing, but concluding that it therefore must be a problem with AdSense and Affiliate programs might be reaching the least optimal conclusion ("lamenting the poor selection of baskets"). Many people are doing well with either or both. So the problem cannot be exclusively the programs themselves.

My comment about learning to weave means that sometimes you have to create your own opportunities and not rely on programs created by someone else. Everyone has their strengths. Some on this board have made millions in the most unlikeliest niches- like a FREE dating site. They created their opportunity. Others fail. Oh well. Some of the people with the biggest sucessess, who I personally know, have had strings of failures. They probably lost more money than you have ever earned. But they're still out there with new ideas, new approaches. And every once in awhile one sticks.

I'm not saying believe in yourself. That would be trite. What I'm saying is to broaden your skills, broaden your approach, investigate different ways of monetization.

[edited by: martinibuster at 9:23 am (utc) on Oct. 25, 2008]

1,000,000 page impressions a day... very impressive. It's great to hear from the experiences of sites with that kind of traffic.

with 1 million impressions a day, are u on the adsense premium program?

very impressive 1,000,000 impressions

My earning is decreasing day by day even i have the same Impression, Click, CTR as in previous months.
I don't what happening my earning decreased by 50%. Can your experience helps me.

Wow 1,000,000 is really good traffic. I can make killer money with that kind of traffic (provided that it is not from video site).