I would also wonder if I'm alone in having a worst ever month.

You are definitely not on your own and by the stickies I have had this thread may fill-up very fast!

I know some people, who were doing ok whilst I was being knocked back again and again, are now experiencing the same as me and just wondering whether ANY of the effort is now worthwhile since no matter what I/we do it simply gets worse and worse.

I know why I've lost traffic, it's all to do with scrapers, image theft and Google's new image SERPs, and Bing for that matter, but quite why some people have been stuffed after so many successful years is perplexing in the very least.

I don't post much here these days since it's, quite simply, pointless for me, the SERPs have been Google-rigged and that's the way they're going to stay and get even worse for many of us.

Google's scraping a massive amount of money, some will be lucky enough to get to feed at that table but don't bet on an extended invitation...YMMV!

I know a very big premium partner has been in disaster mode for the past two weeks, too, so it's not just smaller publishers. Hopefully next month will be better.

April turning out to be the worst performing Adsense month to date.
No doubt it's getting worse, not better.

The US economy is going down the toilet. 20% of american families do not not have one family member that is employed. It's only logical Adsense is paying less.

Something new, "unconfirmed" allegations that AdSense purposefully banned publishers right before their periodic payout so it could keep their ad revenue.: [pastebin.com...]

That discussion is over here: [webmasterworld.com...] - and Google calls baloney.

In terms of RPM, this month has actually been better than our average over the past year, although it's down a bit from last month. Still, "better" is relative: AdSense ain't what it used to be, possibly because there are so many millions of sites and billions of pages competing for ads.

Crap, here we go again. The BIG SQUARE ARROWS are back on my main site. Thought we all decided they look horrible and G got the message. Will this madness never end?

Answers his own question with a "Probably not."

Thanks G, My site now looks like an intersection of one-way streets. I want to make a left turn but all roads lead to the right. I think a U-turn arrow would work better or maybe a "Stop and Click Here" sign.

Well, it appears to just be an IE implementation. Guess I should use IE more often (or not). Still ugly, no matter the browser.

The US economy is going down the toilet. 20% of american families do not not have one family member that is employed. It's only logical Adsense is paying less.

Is that so? 40% down here. Depressing..

Wow was that a bad wednesday 23% off of last wednesday

1st of May = not working day for a lot of countries => 4 days week-end :(

-12.5% down compared to March which was the worst month in 7 years.

-41%. That really sucks.

Regards...jmcc

April has had a significant AdSense milestone for me and not just because it has been my worst-ever month, no, something much more significant to me and a sign of how Google is skewing their SERPs in favour of the USA for my widgets.

For the third consecutive month my earnings from the USA were less than 50% of the total amount.

The first time EVER the USA went below 50% was December 2013, January 53% and now three months of less and less traffic and lower earnings and it is very easy to see why when looking at the condition of their SERPs.

For the moment the programme is utterly fubard for me and I can see absolutely reason why it should get any better since it is not in their shareholders' interests to give searchers decent and honest results.

-25.8

I ended up having a decent month overall except for the last week which began crashing down last wednesday. We will see how May goes.

April was -4.5% down on March but March was a hell of a lot up against February so that's fair. I have great hopes for May - 31 days and two UK bank holidays. The UK economy is improving fast from a very long period of stagnation.

March and April were twins for me (considering the fact that there was one more day in March so there is just about exactly a days earnings difference between the two). Considering the middle of April was touch and go, I'm happy with the results and am looking forward to May too (with fingers crossed of course). So far, a good year overall.

April 2014 was down 13% in CTR and 20% in average CPC price compared to April 2013. Compared to March 2014, was up 5% but CPC down 5% so it earning were exactly the same.

April, great month for me +4.5% compared to march and march was +23.6% :)

For me April was slightly lower than March, which is typical. It was up a fair bit from April 2013. First day of May RPM is down, sadly. Hope it picks up.

Finalized numbers were 149% of April 2013 (and almost smack in the middle between the AdSense reported earnings and the Analytics reported earnings) which is at least a lot closer to normal so I'll take it.

My finalized were only 0.2% lower than Adsense reported. Google brought the gigantic, green, square button back on banner, wonder if they saw the same drop in ctr and are trying to compensate.

Overall, I guess I'm content. I'm down -40% from previous month. Yep, sense the sarcasm and you'd be right. The value of my written word is becoming worthless it seems. Sad face. So am I the record holder for April's earnings? Who was lower? Who can embrace it like I have?

any other factors for you MrSavage? did you change ad positions / other design change? traffic change? on which platform did you see the biggest change?

fin. earnings -5%, just great

The following 8 messages were cut out to new thread by martinibuster. New thread at: google_adsense/4668666.htm [webmasterworld.com]
1:15 pm on May 5, 2014 (utc -5)