A 13% growth for Google versus 2% for partners is capping. Its based on a macro budget they set every quarter for the partners, and that budget is based on the quarterly revenue and profit performance of the company.

Long before the current quarter ends, they start to form an estimate about their quarterly earnings. If that number falls short of their expectations, they downshift the quality of the ads they distribute to partners. If the number looks good, they ramp up the distribution.

If you look at their SEC filings since the beginning of AdSense, the pattern is the same every quarter.

Regarding other opportunities, I know a lot of media and online people who don't think there are plenty of other options.

One exception is direct sales, which has a high labor cost. And even it is doing badly lately for a lot of companies because of struggling retailers.

Yesterday was another good day for me. Regarding pages that had my 200 x 90 link units above the left-hand menu, I had 3352 page views and 1704 impressions, which generated 29 clicks. The next two best ads were both 300 x 250 non-responsive ad units that are embedded within the text.

I read somewhere that this guy was making a shed load of money from 200 unique hits a day, I'm very doubtful that statement is completely true, not from my experience anyway. I think in order to get the most out of AdSense you got to be getting an absolute shed load of hits every day.

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.

I suspect mid five figures in a day is more than most people who take the time to complain on here make in a month or maybe in a year. I'm now in my 8th year of increasing my RPM and overall earnings from the prior year. Almost didn't do it on overall earning in 2014 due to slightly less traffic than 2013 but since my RPM increased I squeaked out the increase in overall earnings. 2015 is doing great compared to 2014. I don't post that often and I suspect there are many who are doing just fine with AdSense that don't take the time to try and balance out the negatives you read on a daily basis in here. Maybe this thread should be split into two segments...positive and negative so viewers can choose which they'd rather read?

My experiences with Adsense are largely positive. The only metrics I care about are traffic and monthly earnings. While they continue to rise each year (and they do) I'm happy. Having said that, it's often cathartic to come in and have a bellyache about short term metrics like CTR and EPC.

The problem with this forum is that we can't see the websites of other posters, so we have to take their grievances at face value. My guess is that our resident Chicken Littles probably run sites with common Adsense problems, including low quality content, low traffic, poor SEO, poor user experience, inefficient ad placement, slow page loading and so on. For that reason I don't read too much into the barrage of negative commentary here.

My guess is that our resident Chicken Littles probably run sites with common Adsense problems, including low quality content, low traffic, poor SEO, poor user experience, inefficient ad placement, slow page loading and so on.

And it's when I read comments like this I realise why I have now almost stopped posting and just why so many others have. Justified and provable criticism is fine, unqualifiable sarcasm certainly is not.

RedBar, note my use of the words "my guess" and "probably". Also the absence of the word "RedBar". Then unknot your underwear and stop taking things so personally.

I have no idea about your sites and what you do with them. What I do have is experience with dealing with webmasters who have told me that their sites are wonderful and user friendly and brilliantly optimised. And probably four fifths of the time they were not.

It's impossible to offer "justified and provable criticism" if you can't see someone's work. But that doesn't mean we're bound to accept the ceaseless complaints and conspiracy theories here as gospel.

My highest traffic site was only 10 pages beginning of this year. Yes, 10 pages pulling in 60k uniques a month (beginning of the year) with a ctr of 1%. For years.....it ran like that.

I ramped up the pages, content, and made it mobile friendly. My traffic almost hit 120k uniques last month. As for my CTR, it's now 0.25%.

This low CTR is NOT because of any reasons cited above. I have very strong rankings and all the pages I put out made 1st page or 1st position.

Can you believe that I am earning LOWER than what I did last year with nearly 4 times less pageviews and impressions?

And nothing nefarious is going on?

No, I tell you what. Google has adjusted some things in Adsense this year under the guise of the mobile update.

And their intentions are very clear. And we may be nearing a major economic meltdown soon enough in my view. So it makes sense for Google to cut out their partner earnings as much as possible in the name of self preservation. All companies do that. Google just does it silently.

No offence intended, but I highly doubt that any poster has had a mid-5 figure Adsense day.

LOL That would be 3.5 times the revenue of Viral Nova (an Alexa top 500 U.S site).

Surely earnings from Google AdSense will fluctuate. I suppose if someone is targeting your website to advertise then they may have a set rate for every click. To be honest, not sure how it works because I've never put adverts on other people's website. However, I've done a similar thing on Facebook and you set the unit for the maximum amount of money that you want to spend every time someone clicks on it. However, if nobody is targeting ads on your website then am I right in saying earnings could fluctuate massively depending on what is showing up for each individual person that visits the site? If you think about it, there's no point in a company from the US advertising to someone in the UK, and vice versa. So unless you had exactly the same people from exactly the same country coming to your site every day then surely it would be impossible to calculate how much money you should be earning.

Occasionally I'll get quite a bit of money from one click, other times the same ad unit will and me just a few pence, you just can't foresee what is going to happen.

No offence intended, but I highly doubt that any poster has had a mid-5 figure Adsense day.

I have them all the time - if you don't count the decimal point.

A site making that amount daily is making over $1 million a year. I doubt there are more than a handful of those.

[edited by: trebuchet at 6:58 pm (utc) on Aug 6, 2015]

No offence intended, but I highly doubt that any poster has had a mid-5 figure Adsense day.

When you have multiple sites that have one very very big day a year (and a handful of very big and just regular big days leading up to it) it works out that way, sometimes. Nobody said it happened daily, or all year round. Plenty of two figure off season days too.

Do you have any idea how a Black Friday site works? Or Haunted Houses that are open less than a month a year? All their revenue is concentrated in a very short time span. Happens all the time. No reason it can't happen with AdSense too.

a 5 figure day could range from $10,000-$99,999 so a mid 5 figure day would be $50,000 in a single day. I doubt there is a single site making $50,000 per day from AdSense. Any site that big is using multiple ad networks. Perhaps people are thinking mid 4 figure day? That's very possible. 5 - no way.

I'm not going to argue about it, and I shouldn't have brought it up. The the point is, if there *was* a cap, I'd think I'd be among the first to see it. And I haven't.

Yes, five figures is possible. I've seen it happen first hand. Keep in mind that the other post had the phrase "multiple sites." A group of news media sites can have those kinds of days. A single site would be very rare.

Multiples sites 5 figures possible. 1 site mid 5 figures in a single day - not happening from AdSense.

I recall reading somewhere that Perez Hilton makes six figures a month, so if he posted something that went viral, e.g. pictures of Emma Watson swimming the English Channel nude, then I guess millions of pageviews and five figures in a day are possible.

While netmeg is right about seasonal spikes and surges, I expect that any site capable of reaping $50k on its best days is still going to make $1k plus on its slow days. Those are some big numbers for us humble publishers.

The actual phrase used was

I can go back and forth from low two figures to mid five figures per day, depending on the time of year.

.

That means, in my understanding, from $10 to $99,999..Not $$xx,xxx every day. A quite different proposition.

If I earned $10 per day I wouldn't be in this business, it would be a total waste of my efforts. Somewhere in between leaves a lot to the imagination.

I never hit anywhere like $xx,xxx in a day, never hit $x,xxx for that matter. But I do know this, one day's earnings can be several times another days earnings. And it's clear to me that the controlling factor is a combination of season first, and the day of the week next.

On that basis, for me, the "cap" doesn't exist. Not long term anyway.

No offence intended, but I highly doubt that any poster has had a mid-5 figure Adsense day

Obviously, you don't know netmeg.

I guarantee that if you tried to gain clicks through adult content and lies you wouldn't last very long with AdSense.

Something similar happened to me a year or so ago. There was a documentary about this girl in the UK who had made a sex video and then her boyfriend had uploaded it to the Internet. He went to prison for it. I tried an experiment and started a thread on my website talking about this girl. Basically, her name accompanied with the word video brought my website right up in the first few listings of Google. A few months later Google AdSense contacted me and requested that I remove the content. I know that she had spent a long time getting the videos removed from the Internet, so whether she came across the post I made I don't know. However, there was nothing sexual, just the story about it. However, I think it was the actual title of the thread that did it. I had used her name and something like sex video, can't remember.

Traffic down, adsense earning down this month. It seems there is no lowest earning, only lower earning.

Total collapse in CTR today and lo and behold, there were a load of new Gmail ads. Now removed.

Stats reporting 100+ clicks since the start of the day. Total clicks paid in Adsense = 5.

I was thinking I was having a remarkably good day for a Thursday but then I remembered it was Friday.

"Total collapse in CTR today and lo and behold, there were a load of new Gmail ads. Now removed."

I don't get it. Adwords is supposed to optimise things, pumping their own products like gmail and maps, and paying peanuts when there are higher paying, higher CTR ads available, would be a terrible business strategy and verging on misrepresentation of their product.

No surprises here. We're having our usual modest early-August slump (although today is up over the same day last week) as people go on vacation. If history is a guide, the dip will be followed by another peak and then a slow downhill trend in early fall. As the French expression goes, "The more things change, the more they stay the same."

I don't get it. Adwords is supposed to optimise things, pumping their own products like gmail and maps, and paying peanuts when there are higher paying, higher CTR ads available, would be a terrible business strategy and verging on misrepresentation of their product.

I doubt if it's done on purpose.

Surprisingly, a (relatively) good start to the day, after 11 days in a terrible slump following a great day. I hope my "penalty" for the too-good-to-be-true day has worn itself out :)

I hope. I've had many good starts to the day only to fizzle out into a poor day by the end due to the clicks drying up, a familiar experience for me.

But at least, something positive and hopeful in a long time.

Try beating these metrics for one of my countries:

13 PVs
1 Click
7.69% CTR
0.00 CPC
0.01 RPM
0.00 Earnings

Awesome stuff, it's not possible to go any lower so I expect they'll be sending out invoices soon for displaying their defunct programme.

"I doubt if it's done on purpose."

Holy hell.
I reviewed my ads and removed about 40 Gmail for work ads. There are still at ton more though.. including map ads and in other languages.

RPM today is up 20% over the last 5 days average.

that's insane and really annoying. What kind of network are they running here? its unbelievable.