I said I'd be around, so, here it is Monday, January 11, and adsense is pretty much sucking air (that's about as nicely as I can put it).

So, is it adsense, or, is it everything? Well, US stock markets just had their worst month to start a year EVER, opening the conversation to the cause for adsense earnings being far, far down, is not adsense, or google, but the entire economy. Not only did US markets have a horrible week to start the new year, but most other major world markets are not doing well either.

As I've claimed in the past to be something of a junior economist (no formal training, just lots of hands-on experience in business), the global economy has not looked well for a long time. The economies of the US, Europe, China and Japan have been held up by massive money printing by central banks. That era seems to be at an end.

If you are heavily in debt or leveraged, you may have issues going forward, but DO NOT PANIC. There will be millions in much the same boat. People are being crushed by a combination of low wages, high rents, high utility bills and fees and onerous TAXES. Be thankful, if you have an online business, that you are not burdened by the crushing regulations which are killing small business in the US.

It's not all gloom and doom, however, if you can ride out the coming economic and social firestorm. On the other side will be a world with less regulation, lower prices, bargains galore. It helps to be very self-reliant and independent and to have some savings in precious metals, cash and useful machinery, tools, and vehicles. Start a garden come spring. That's a must, even if you can only grow a few plants on a terrace. Every little bit will help.

Cut your expenses as much as possible. I would expect many people to cut cable TV service and mobile phone usage, so going mobile may not be the panacea as Google has presented it. Also, Facebook is a joke, a farce, useless, except to wish old friends you haven't seen in years a happy birthday. Otherwise, it's a total time-waster.

Twitter is somewhat more useful for business, to promote new pages, etc. For now, that's all I have to offer. As an old mentor told me many years ago, "Plan your work. Work your plan." Persistence and an insistence to never allow failure will carry the day, the week, the year. Good luck to all.

I don't think that Google has a good handle on mobile ad delivery or click fraud, so while my earnings haven't fallen too much, I'm stepping up my search and evaluation of other monetization models. I sure don't want to rely on it or even assume it's going to be the major chunk of my portfolio in two years.

Think about it. How many times, after a ginormous traffic or revenue drop, has Google bounced back bigtime with rainbows and unicorns? It's kind of like winning the Powerball. Someone's gotta do it eventually, but the chances could be one in 300 million.

Let's please stay on topic. The narrow topic is January 2016 AdSense Earnings and Observations.

Posts that are completely off topic may be subject to removal (by popular demand of members).

Thanks. ;)

mb

[edited by: martinibuster at 7:45 pm (utc) on Jan 11, 2016]

Earning money from Google AdSense is rather like being the manager of a football team. When it's going well it can be very lucrative, however it can all come to an end very abruptly without any warning.

If you've been affected, it's unlikely things will get better (your earnings) unless you can drive a ton more traffic. Because CTR and CPC is down for many people for 2 reasons (that I know I've posted many times recently).

Quality advertisers have shifted to YouTube and Facebook. Big brands are, fewer and fewer, appearing on smaller publisher sites like the majority of us here. If you are B2B you are probably faring better than publishers in competitive consumer goods verticals.

This is the reason people. It's not something more complicated or likely to be "fixed".

There was lots more money to go around a few years ago, now everybody wants to get on the bandwagon. Because there's more websites the amount of money you earn from each click is obviously going to be a lot less. I don't necessarily believe that having a unique niche is the key, unless of course you are a top blogger recommending diamond engagement rings :-). I've always said that driving as much traffic to your website is the best way to earn money.

I don't necessarily believe that having a unique niche is the key, unless of course you are a top blogger recommending diamond engagement rings :-). I've always said that driving as much traffic to your website is the best way to earn money.

Ideally, you have the right topic, the right readers (e.g., people who are researching purchases), and a decent amount of traffic.That's been my experience over the years with both advertising and affiliate commissions.

So my dear webmasters, I've been following your discussions for months now without telling my point of view.

Some of you speculate that advertisers have moved to YouTube in the past two years, which left you with less money and more for the big guys there.
And eh, that's not true. I am one of these big guy YouTubers, having tons of traffic (80.000 - 100.000 daily pageviews, increasing steadily) and experience the same you did and still do since 2012: Average AdSense earnings are 2.5 times lower than they were three years ago. And unfortunately that's a pattern that continues, it is getting worse every year. RPM is decreasing while traffic is growing, at least that's what kept me in the game for this long.
By the way: Most of my traffic is from desktop users, just 25% mobile and 20% tablet.
And I don't know about the type of guys that are crying over RPM of around 2£; I did not have a single month with such high numbers for the last 18 months.
And January is always abysmal, we know that. But let's get this clear. Next year will be worse than now. Prepare to have a product to sell that people will actually value to buy... Because otherwise it's going to be tough times.

As I see it, advertisers are either too stupid (still on TV, on Facebook - like srsly the worst place to advertise, such an hypocrite company) or too many people are trying to make their living with ads - growth from advertisers can't keep up with the growth of publishers.

I've been running Adsense in 3 sites I own.

One of the sites serves copyrighted content from the major record labels through key content providers. Hence, I had to check constantly on the ads being served on this site for publishers running phony sites.

Well, I got tired and nuke Adsense from this site. Pennies do not pay for the time it takes to ensure only quality Adsense ads are served on a site.

A bit more information ...

I did block the following in my Adsense control panel: All sensitive categories; 40 general categories; 120 specific URLs.

Yet, unwanted ads still got in.

On the site I nuked Adsense completely, I´m still testing ads from another major player in the business, Amazon.

Holy deadsense Batman.

What's going on with this Groogle gong show.

I'm always lurking here to see if everyone else is in the same boat or just me etc. I'm a YouTube I get about 10k daily pageviews nothing huge unfortunately only recently has my traffic started to pick up although I've been running AdSense on my channel since 2012. My content is likely regarded by youtube/AdSense as high quality because I normally get paid a high rpm but it'd been decreasing like everyone else. In 2012 even though my pageviews were crap I was getting $8-10 rpm now at best like last month on December I averaged $4. This month has been a complete disaster so far it started off under $1 rpm for me and it seems to be slowly creeping back to a normal low of $2-3 I'm at $1.50 right now ugh so frustrating though makes you not even want to create content anymore.

Quality advertisers have shifted to YouTube and Facebook.

Still disagree.

Incidentally, I still plan to run Adsense on the other 2 sites. I hope I won't have to spend so much time taking a look at the Ad review center. I'll let you know how it goes in about a week.

<deleted>

Monday was bad, real bad. RPM continues to be much lower than expected even on a Monday - almost lower by 35%. I think it's a new normal for 2016.

Yep, it's like the first week of 2016 were the last $.
No new campaigns...

The ads are rubbish (a lot of "increase your size"/"Get fit now" kind of ads).

While I can't complain at the moment, January is looking like it's going to be a pretty good month. Page rpm yesterday was £2.86 and impression rpm was 82p, along with 73 clicks it wasn't a bad day.

Mind you, I was getting a little bit worried in December that may be one of these Panda updates had affected my website because my hit rate dropped by about 1000 each day. However, it seems to have recovered now, in fact I had something like 4170 hits on the website on Sunday, I think that is either equalling, or just below my all-time best for a single day.

Like I've said on more than one occasion, I don't think I will ever go back to what it was like two years ago, but I am more than happy with earnings at the moment, certainly not declining with me.

After 12 years it's nearly the end of my AdSense journey, January 2016 v 2015 earnings so far are 55.8%, it's almost at the point that it can't be sliced any thinner.

I know I've said the above before however this time, unless it picks up seriously, it will be pointless continuing with AdSense and in my industry there ia no alternative ad platform and as for affilates, bah!

Still disagree.

Me too, but arguing over it is more trouble than it's worth.

RPM's beginning to rise towards the middle of the month - last few weeks would've been rubbish if it were not for some great traffic.

Still tracking at about the same as December money wise.

I'm just astonished at the horrendous quality of ads that's running on my sites. But what's interesting is my big competitor is running some really good quality adsense ads. Google probably has a new algorithm that detects if a site is high quality. If the bot detects it's not good quality, it will only show ads that is total garbage (very low rpm).

But i don't believe for a second that my site is bad quality, that is what frustrates me.

I've just saw an "Increase your size" ad on my site! No joke ! :o

It was a deceptive ad for a Russian haircare!

This is the "bottom of the barrel"!

Speaking of ads, I'd appreciate it if Google could flag/reject "old" ads. I am still seeing a significant portion of ads that are promoting "Black Friday" deals from 2015 and ads that have dates that are in the past.

could flag/reject "old" ads

Plus ads that go through to 404 and blank pages.

I object to Google using my website to advertise their own services, "your ads here" for instance. I'm quite sure that somebody browsing a fish keeping website is going to be interested in advertising on Google.

A further EPC collapse for me today, even India's is down 50% ... my expected recovery this week simply is not happening, decisions, decisions.

Weird. Is anyone else who did the Wordpress and Genesis framework upgrade last week noticing that Adsense ads are not displaying all the time? Thanks

My ads have disappeared. WTF? I don't see a single ad on my 3500-page website. Is anyone else having this problem?

I am seeing the issue with ad serving I thought it was temporary but it appears to be continuous. I started noticing the issue yesterday where I think about 20% of the ads fail to load. Or it could my RTB network having issue, I use RTB as first tier and fall to adsense as second filler, but the RTB tier looked fine.

I remember seeing Netmeg mentioning a couple days ago. Has someone figured out the reason?