Taken this from another thread [webmasterworld.com] to avoid hijacking that discussion...

>> I know everyone is doing excellent with their Adsense incomes lately so this may be a niche discussion.

> Not me. Worst AdSense year so far.

Ditto. Seriously, the average for the last 12 months is about 25% of the same period five years ago. Slowly declining.

Actually, this month I had a couple of days that TF display ads paid more than AdSense - when AdSense used to pay ten times more on the same day.

Blame this on the large number of publishers. Or the different demographics now (our traffic moved from predominantly US to predominantly NZ, where we're based). Or just plainly advertisers paying less.

We have more pageviews than ever. Our CTR is no different now than before.

I'm still not convinced that Google algorithms correctly select the best paid ad between text links and banners. I am not sure advertisers and their agencies understand they are not guaranteed presence in my inventory - based on the CTR I see versus the number of ads from some large advertisers, they would be doing a lot better (at a cheaper cost) if advertising directly with us rather than via Adwords.

I tried changing ad positioning. I tried changing number of ad units available to AdSense. I had 1-on-1 chats with Google optimisation folks and tried their suggestions. Nothing actually change the numbers.

So what are your impressions? Are you making more or less than five years ago? And what changes have you made to try and increase this?