Don't you just love it when some effing b'stard downloads an entire site and hasn't the freakin' decency to at least give one consolation click?

AdSense is FUBARD!

Delete as appropriate mods, I really couldn't give a frig any more more about this preposterous programme!

Decent results today, but previous few days were dreadful.

For the US companies I manage I recommend to move away from adsense and try out the CPA model. The US EPC is at 1/3 what is was last year. They are seeing the lowest US EPC since 2007 across the board.

I told them to do split testing (Adsense and CPA model).

The results were amazing. Some sites which did $15/day with 1k SE visitors/day with adsense do $500/day with CPA now.
If this continues adsense will be no option for most local companies any more.

If you own a law, financial, real estate, construction, car dealer .. and/or local site (B2C) adsense is wasted traffic and money.

If they pay you pennies just move on. The don't own the advertising business.

@trebuchet funny you should mention plenty of fish, I used to get a ton of their AdSense units on my Oscar fish site a few years ago, haven't seen them in quite a while though. I listen to an interview with the dude who set up plenty of fish any told quite a funny story about how he took a rather large AdSense cheque to the bank but they wouldn't cash it because it was too big. Not sure why, but that's what he said. Mind you, all these free dating websites are the same, a large portion of the people who join up are not who they say they are. I know this because I started a disabled dating website last year and even though I got a lot of genuine members joining, a large portion were most definitely suspicious. In fact, I got into the habit of googling profile photos which proved they were scammers. In the end, I got fed up with it and stop the website, just not worth the hassle.

In the US, any bank transaction over $10k gets reported to the govt for tax and potential money laundering reasons. Might have been something like that with him - in some places, cash like that can only be drug money (or worse)

(and you stopped seeing his ads probably because he finally hired a PPC manager who knew how to add negatives. I would never let "plentyoffish" run on a fish site, but I see that all the time - one of my clients for banking supplies sees his competitors' ads running for "baking supplies." That's just sloppy right there.)

Even MY AdSense has tanked so far this month, and that's a first. I'm pretty sure it's because my mobile ratio (already high) went way even higher. I'll figure it out.

Wow. Netmeg, if you're saying that, what about the rest of us? ;-)

Down 20% yesterday from previous day last week, yikes!

I think that people in the US see more relevant ads on my site than I do here in the UK. That's probably because there's more people and more businesses.

For August, I am seeing a huge negative change in the click recording, primarily from the US. Clicks from the US don't actually start getting registered until around noon EST, and the number is a lot less now throughout the day. Even as my traffic is better than ever. This is a new phenomenon. A first. And it's abrupt.

It all began from a huge earning day I had in late July, and I take it this is the subsequent "penalty" that Adsense will impose on me to knock me back down again. Things have been the worst, ever since. Every single day since, has been in the red. When I had that record day, I was wondering when the "retribution" would commence....

So who still thinks Google doesn't cap and tightly control earnings? :)

So who still thinks Google doesn't cap and tightly control earnings? :)

I don't.

If they pay you pennies just move on. The don't own the advertising business.

Down this month also, not that last month was great.

More mobile traffic = lower Adsense earnings.

60% of my traffic is mobile however 65% off Adsense earnings come from desktop

Non-Adsense earnings are up, it's just Adsense that is tanking.

My earnings were slowly declining, however the last two months things have seem to have improved. A question, those of you who have seen a decline in earnings, have you experimented with different units in different places? If you are seeing a lot of mobile traffic then it's a really good idea to get an idea of exactly what your website looks like when it first comes up. I found that a 200 x 90 link unit placed in the left-hand column above the menu does exceptionally well. This link unit is there straightaway when somebody opens my site up on a mobile phone. I think in many cases they are clicking on these links because they always display relative keywords to my site.

I've also gone back to non-responsive ads within my text. The way I look at it is I want 300 x 250 units displayed within the text whenever somebody is using a desktop. You don't need a responsive unit for a desktop display. However, I know that it's important that these units display properly on a mobile device. Now if you use a responsive unit, it will be resized to about 300 x 250 most of the time when viewed on a mobile device. So if this is the case, what is the point of using a responsive ad unit? So I got the best of both worlds, I can use a couple of div tags to embed my unit within a paragraph of text, but it will display properly on a mobile phone.

Google does cap and tightly control earnings. That's how they increase the stock price. From the 2nd quarter earnings report:

Paid clicks on Google sites: +30% over the prior year
Paid clicks on partner sites: -9%

Cost per click on Google sites: -16%
Cost per click on partner sites: -3%

Total Google revenue: +13%
Total partner revenue: +2%

It's hard to believe that Google would sacrifice company profits and the stock price for the sake of keeping all of its partners happy.

Well, as of Wednesday, my clicks have hardly moved since the start. This is a very ABRUPT change from last month or at any time in Adsense history.

I am headed for a single.digit.day and each day I get around 30-35K pageviews. Don't tell me this is normal. It's like a new month, brings totally new behavior from visitors, and they collectively decided not to click. Or all of them decided they won't click before lunchtime.

No, I am not buying this.

@ebuzz if you are getting hardly anything from 35,000 page views then I would have to agree something is not working. I am averaging between 5500 & 6000 page views each day with around 14,000 impressions. Mind you, I only started getting 14,000 impressions in the last three days, that was after I added a few more AdSense units. It's been several years since my monthly earnings were less than three digits.

Have you checked Google analytics to see how many of these page views are actually human? I know that the majority of my visitors are human, my website is a support website for fish keepers so I'm getting people who are looking for information, therefore they are reading the articles. I don't know what the subject of your site is, but could it be that people are hitting on your website but leaving straightaway without bothering to hang around? From my experience using AdSense, in order to get a decent amount of clicks you've actually got to get people hanging around and reading your content. If somebody is looking for something then if they don't find that they will just go elsewhere, don't think they will start clicking Google AdSense units.

@Ironside

I forgot to mention that the 30k pvs is the total number I get from all my combined channels in Adsense. But still...

Looks like the Adsense roller coaster is headed down this month :(

So who still thinks Google doesn't cap and tightly control earnings? :)

I also highly doubt it. With the tools you have you can produce anecdotal evidence at best.

What would they gain from doing that anyway?

@Sheqel

Think about it first.

Google has no qualms in disposing of publishers (banning) and they have disabled even big guys who were making them loads of cash.

Google has no qualms deducting from publisher earnings and supposedly returning them to the advertiser. Just ask those who had a very large chunk of their earnings wiped out because it was "invalid traffic".

Google has no qualms ignoring clicks in the very same way that they delete off earnings from "invalid traffic". And they will keep on finding more and more reasons not to regard a click as "acceptable".

It seems you may not be familiar with Googles mindset.

Sheqel, please read the 5th post above yours. They admit it in the numbers on public documents.

I often hear about people who have been banned. People often say they don't know why it's happened. There must be a reason why Google bans you, I can't believe they will just do it for no reason. Take me for instance, I've been with Google now for seven years. About two years ago I got an email from Google telling me that one of my websites was contravening their rules because it had adult content on some of the pages. I asked them where it was a provided me with several links. Basically, they were unhappy with some jokes on my webpage. There are no sexual images or videos, they were simply jokes with an adult nature. At the time, I was getting a shed load of visitors to my jokes page, actually I still do, most of my traffic comes through my jokes. Anyway, I told them that I wasn't prepared to remove the pages because a lot of my traffic came through them. All they've done is block that particular website from the displaying AdSense, none of my other websites got banned at all.

Even if my earnings dwindle down to nothing, I won't believe there's a cap. All evidence of it is anecdotal, and my own sites and plenty of others just don't show it. I can go back and forth from low two figures to mid five figures per day, depending on the time of year. That's not Google, it's the nature of my niches. Even if my earnings for the rest of 2015 dwindle down to nothing, I'm already past all of 2014 earnings - and I've done that every year. I got 99 problems with Google, but an earnings cap ain't one.

You want to believe in a cap, go ahead, but I don't. It would certainly be a lot easier if I did, because then I could let myself off the hook about site improvements, testing, and so on, because it'll never improve past a certain point so why try. Personally, I'm not built that way. I hope the ones who do believe in a cap have a plan B. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Netmeg, maybe we're talking about two different beasts. The evidence is strong that there is a cap at the macro level. I buy the argument that there is not a cap at the account level.

The only cap is the publisher, not Adsense.

There are plenty of other advertising opportunities. If Adsense is not working try another or a combination of advertising revenues.

The cap is on your head.

Yep. AdSense isn't optimal for every site, or every niche.

Hi I'm from Europe and started a year ago with a CPM based network combined with Adsense. This works well and I can use floorprices and if it's below my floorprice Adsense will be showed.

Anyway, last days I noticed more pageviews at Adsense than Analytics and I wonder how this is possible.

Is it possible that what we are observing and calling caps are a combination of advertisers' daily budgets running out in combination with smart pricing? Something's definitely in play here, but I doubt it's Google saying "thou shalt not make more than x dollars per day". It seems like advertisers just aren't spending this summer. Also, this whole Flash debacle is probably costing us.
I may start a system that when earnings seem to seize up around midday, I may start pulling Adsense ads and subbing in other ads from other networks in their place on key sites' key pages. I'd be interested to see how those pages do during the second half of the day with that scenario as compared to days when leaving Adsense on all day.

I don't know if I'd call them "caps" set in place by Google, but what I can attest to is that there are very conservative stopgaps that very often cost you money. Even when you are experiencing legitimate traffic/earnings spikes. I have managed a premium publisher account for 3+ years now so have a little more transparency than the average publisher. Here is the most common "caps"/"stopgap" sceanrio. AdSense knows your typical CTR and daily earnings...and yes they adjust it according for better times of the year for publishers. For me, being in e-commerce holiday is huge. But basically, publishers don't have THAT much in the way of seasonality and again they know your average CTR and daily earnings. So what happens if say your daily average earnings is $20 per day and it's 11am and you are almost already at that $20 daily earnings average? Well most likely your account will be flagged and you won't earn any more money for the better part of that day. It happens all the time. I'd day it's on average 10-12 hours before clicks and earnings resume in scenarios like this. So essentially you lose 50% of what you could have made that day. Their system is not unlike the stock exchange when trading gets halted when the market goes too high or too low. This stopgap absolutely exists and I have proof of it. Even I don't know 1/2 of the protections that are in place now, but I know much more than most of you and probably shouldn't be talking about it.

Funny enough, I think Admob is not affected by all that's going on, or affected very little. If you're a programmer specializing in Android app development, you're still on the gravy train.

I have a friend who gets a million plus views a month and his earnings are holding steady. Yes, there was a downturn starting around beginning of this year, but nothing at all like what's affecting Adsense. You don't hear Admob people complaining, because for them, Admob is still like Adsense was waaaay back then.

YouTube partners have definitely been greatly affected, all the way from payment problems to earning declines to stats not updating, to frequent disablings.

All happening this year....

@Sheqel

Think about it first.

Yes. They have to put certain protections in place to prevent fraud. They may, and probably do, lean to the side of overcompensation in favor of the advertiser, but that is their prerogative, and like some others said, if you are unhappy with this prerogative, by all means, move on.

Sheqel, please read the 5th post above yours. They admit it in the numbers on public documents.

Not sure how I should conclude that Google is capping publishers, according to those numbers.