Buying practices, and those those who buy, have changed over the last five years. The folks with money already have what they want (mostly) or have other ways of accumulating same.

Maybe (I don't claim any insights on that score), but let's not forget that folks who do have money buy more than widgets, whatsits, or bling. People spend enormous amounts of money on travel, dining, entertainment, dog grooming, and activities or services of all kinds. Joe Yuppie or Harriet Heiress can live in a "tiny house" and drive a Car2Go but still blow twenty grand on a Mediterranean cruise or spend hundreds of dollars on restaurant meals and bar tabs every month.

"If that's really the case, then AdSense is probably not a good fit for you."

I thought Google would have good technology to load my sites with good ads with little effort on my part.

While Google has done a pretty good job in the past 2-3 years to get rid of spammers on its search results, it still has to do a lot of work on its Adsense technology.

We've been with AdSense for around 9 years. Made around US 5 million. Since April, 2014 earnings dropped dramatically and never came back. For this time we have tried dozens of other ad platforms (before and after drop), none of them were even close to AdSense. While we all could be mad on Google for being ignorant selfish monopolist, we have to understand, that this is just a business. They have to cover their huge investments.

If I were Google, I would take all the leading ad platforms, took their peak performance and made AdSense just a little bigger. This way AdSense won't be as good, as in the past, but it still will be better than any other network. It's that simple for me.

I pre-sell stuff for others aka affiliate marketing and it has been very good for me since the outset. However, there definitely are differences in what 'sells' the best via which device. And that goes for AdSense as well.

For instance I move a zillion coupons for between a fraction of a penny and a fraction of a buck each. Because I know the device that loaded the coupon and, for digital sales, the device that redeemed there is a significant amount of device syncing/sharing: by redemption alone I would think 99% of digitally redeemed coupons were phone 'sales', however, device loading of redeemed shows ~15% desktop, ~30% laptop, ~30% tablet, ~25% phone. People use a variety of devices to access - and share - data and information.

Of course that does not apply to AdSense! You see an ad on the rendered screen of a given device and click (or view) it or not. For that reason comparing traffic percentages to conversion rates by device type can be telling.
Percentage of traffic 2015:
* Phones: ~17%
* Tablets: ~25%
* Lap/Desk: ~58%

Percentage of AdSense revenue 2015:
* Phones: ~6%
* Tablets: ~14%
* Lap/Desk: ~80%

Simply put, in 2015 my:
* phone traffic AdSense value was ~25% of lap/desktop.
* tablet traffic AdSense value was ~41% of lap/desktop.
If I was a sole AdSense revenue stream business I would not be impressed by the advent/uptake of mobile in my niche.

Welcome back to WebmasterWorld Marcuss, I do assume it's the old Marcus from a few years ago when several of us had different monickers?

Since April, 2014 earnings dropped dramatically and never came back.

That's interesting, you were a big earner, did they ever give you an explanation for this?

There have been a LOT of AdWords changes over the past few years (and particular the past year) and remember - when you want to know what's happening with AdSense the first place you need to look is at AdWords. I don't think you can understand one without having a pretty good understanding of the other.

AdWords Display Network:
[google.com...]

Inside AdWords Blog:
[adwords.blogspot.com...]

(redbar, I think that's a different Marcus)

[edited by: netmeg at 5:13 pm (utc) on Jan 4, 2016]

Compared to iamlost, we did well with tablet ads in 2015. Our average RPM for tablets was slightly higher than for desktops, and about a third of our revenue came from tablets.

Mobile RPM, on the other hand, was terrible (about a third of our desktop and tablet RPM). Unfortunately, mobile doesn't generate much affiliate revenue for us, either. I regard it as a loss leader: If we're lucky, some of the people who browse our site on their phones will visit our site from their desktops or laptops (or tablets, for that matter) when they're in a mood for more serious research.

I'm a publisher that is very seasonal; right now it's in the lowest part of the dip, and it should start climbing from now on.

If the pattern I anticipate continues, mobile visitors will continue to show growth in numbers, but rarely click, but i'd add that desktop has not declined nearly as much as it has for some. Obviously, I'm hoping that trend for desktop will continue, especially as mobile does not do particularly well for me.

I carried out a small survey of my own over Christmas by asking my friends and family to do some research and to tell me, specifically, what they found. I asked them not to click on any ads, but to let me know if they would have clicked on the ad because it gave them what they wanted.

There are other factors at play, too, and this was not an entirely scientific exercise, but it did cement some of my feelings about trends.

The ads they found were poor, in almost all cases, and were very unlikely to click on them. Remarketing just annoyed them. Deceptive ads put them off the whole site. Some graphics ads were awful and extremely distracting.
Positive messages were that some of the sites with fewer, but targeted ads were better than those sites covered in promo. Text ads were fine, and were often clearly marked as an ad.

Ad blindness was also an issue.

That's all there was to the survey of about a dozen people from a range of age groups, but were all adults.

If I look at the trends I see developing on other publisher's sites I visit (not just AdSense publishers), I believe part of the problem is comes from overzealous publishers trying hard to trick people into clicking something so the publisher earns: Deceptive practices. Site visitors have become considerably better educated, and it's likely they are avoiding the ads.

No, AdSense is not dead, but it is just different, in a mobile and savvy surfer market. Adapt and develop, imho.