Same for me. Just shocking. I thought things were improving in the second half of January. But they slumped a few days into February and are worse than ever. The weekend just gone was appalling. Pageviews were normal but ad quality, CTR, EPC, RPM were all abysmal. If this is a sign of things to come then I'm going to fast track my alternative monetisation plans.

Today is very LOW cost per click.

Yep, is the day after the official "f**king day", so all the advertisers are tired, sad or with a hangover!

Pageviews were normal but ad quality, CTR, EPC, RPM were all abysmal.

Yep, I am also seeing pages on several sites with no ads whatsoever, is the publisher inventory that depleted?

I don't remeber seeing this recently however yesterday I saw an ad for Facebook ... what, Facebook has to advertise to an English-speaking market?

Everyone is off work with Presidents' Day today - half term for schools. My page views are down and adsense is all down too

Everyone is off work with Presidents' Day today

Not everyone. Mainly bank workers, school workers and government employees.

Everyone is off work with Presidents' Day today

If we all went by that fuzzy logic then shouldn't everyone be at home on their devices? Nope, some are out shopping, some are clearing drives from snow, some are sunbathing, some are at the gym meanwhile the vast majority in the world are probably doing some kind of work unless one is unfortunate enough to be in a war or refugee camp.

Easter, Thanksgiving, Xmas and New Year's Day in the west I'll accept, the occasional sporting event as well and that doesn't always affect things overly. How about the Chinese New Year or Indian Diwali, sure they do have some effect but not by massive amounts like I had a couple of days back.

Don't forget that computers ain't what they used to be, for many they are not tied to a desk any more, they're mobile and maybe, just maybe, they do not find the necessity to use them all the time.

Remember this, until not so long ago most had to have fixed-line connected device to access email and Facebook and respond immediately if needs be, now many are using smartphone apps to reply when they want to using many more apps such as Instagram, Twitter and Whatsapp ... <<< Notice those, mobile, people roaming the world doing what they like, where they like, from their phones.

One thing I do always note on the "quieter" days is that my volume of spam reduces considerably, probably by as much as 80-90%, quite what that tells me is another thing altogether.

@RedBar, yes, something very strange is happening on holidays on the past two years.
I suspect that is the holiday + google changes combined (also add the throttling effect).
In the past was a something pretty common to release big changes on Easter or Thanksgiving!
They did that in order to not reverse engineer the effect and to have smaller impact on business if something goes horribly wrong.

We are used with no communication strategy from Google, but now is very, very quiet! Too quiet!

Me and probably others are hoping for a Penguin or even Panda run, to see if the modification and efforts have a good impact, but all I see is:
- lower traffic
- 40% lower payment since 25 December 2015
- less and less clicks on the ads. From 13 000 clicks/day in January, to 9200 now.

All combined had a disastrous effect on my business.
From 50% profit two years ago, to losses in 2016 and things are not looking good from any direction: traffic, payments, clicks.
I'll accept the losses for maximum March 2016, after that, I need to cut the staff again and to close some sites, in the hope that I will stop the losses.

The situation is like this: if your income decreases by 50% in January and February, what do you do ?
Someone is abusing the bidding systems or many companies keep the liquidities for a rainy day (see the stock market).

The Serp is frozen, the "spice is not flowing as it should".

[edited by: Mentat at 12:25 pm (utc) on Feb 16, 2016]

Looks like another weird day. So far today I've had 7099 page views and 6098 impressions. This seems to have pushed the page rpm right down to 49p. But the silly thing is I've earned £3.46 p from just 10 clicks. Normally that would mean the page rpm would be very high. Anybody understand this?

incredibly low RPM just 0.19$. For over 61000 page views get only 11.58$

yes, something very strange is happening on holidays on the past two years.

KISS, I've always preferred KISS, as soon as anyone tries to "justify" anything with all kinds of explanation, think KISS since that is invariably the answer.

Two years is a very significant number and it equates to the beginning of the massive growth in smartphones, sure they were around before however the majority of people could not warrant the expenditure, now fantastic brand new SIM free smartphones are available for USD 50-100.

Google have already admitted that they dropped the ball on mobile and using one a lot on an every day basis I have to say I rarely notice any ads. My own html5 responsive sites carry one ad at the end of every page, that's it, I tried it with one at the top of the page however it looked awful therefore I removed it off every site.

I'm building a new site at the moment and although there will be slot made available for advertising I very much doubt I'll use it other than for my own purposes.

From 13 000 clicks/day in January, to 9200 now.

Does this drop equate with your rise in mobile users?

I have to say I'm seeing some very strange ad targetting on my sites and then again no ads appearing whatsoever.

Perspective wise, with these earning showing over the past month or so, I would need about 5 months to make what I made in 1 month not that long ago. I'm sure some will rejoice because with this type of income, there is next to zero point in considering launching new websites or spending time updating existing sites which largely relied on Adsense. Many people do/did rely on Adsense to make things worthwhile. I'm sure a few fellow publishers are just thrilled at the demise of many. Less competition so enjoy. I should also mention that I see clicks coming in from sites that are so ancient and forgotten about, it's utterly bizarre. From left field and makes next to no sense. Clicks now? Why? The one site which I added content and added more ad units? It's all but disappeared from my earnings page. It's so counter logical it's not funny.

From 13 000 clicks/day in January, to 9200 now.

I forgot to mention, July 2015 my PVs stayed the same yet clicks halved over a week and have never returned to that volume. It certainly wan't me, it was something Google did.

I can't believe with the meagre volume of clicks I get these days that it could have been fraud.

Very strong day yesterday: The highest revenues in many months. (All on desktop/laptop/tablet pages, though--we don't use AdSense on mobile pages.)

I've just receive this:

Dear Customer,

One piece of feedback our sales and support teams have heard over the years is that users want to know about urgent issues impacting DoubleClick products as soon as possible.

Accordingly, on February 22, we are launching the Ads Status Dashboard [ads.google.com], a new publicly-accessible tool that allows you to learn about major outages or functionality concerns across DoubleClick products, including DoubleClick for Publishers, DoubleClick Ad Exchange and DoubleClick Sales Manager. When a major issue impacting large numbers of users is identified, we will post an outage notice in the appropriate row on the Dashboard, then provide updates to the outage notice at a regular interval until the issue is resolved.

We’re hoping this will allow all of our users to get access to crucial information quickly and without friction -- anyone who may be impacted can access the dashboard to check on the status of our products, so bookmark it, share it, and return to it often. We hope it saves you time!

Regards,
The DoubleClick for Publishers Team

Mentat, you're a big publisher I didn't know you're affected too. I thought Adsense only steal money from small publishers because they know we can't fight back. I guess no one's immune.

I don't understand what's going on. Today I am currently at 18,700 page views and 17,700 impressions. I've had 27 clicks and my earnings are £7.40. However, page rpm is at 40p and impression rpm is at 42p. If I compare these figures to February 4 I can see I earned £7.97 p that day with 45 clicks, 5700 page views, 14,000 page impressions, a page rpm of £1.38 and impression rpm of 53p. No idea what's going on today

Yesterday was amazing day with 200% more earnings than average. Today is opposite, I'm just at 20% of average, it will be probably the worst day in years. So many fluctuations, I don't like what adsense became.

Today I am currently at 18,700 page views and 17,700 impressions. I've had 27 clicks and my earnings are £7.40... If I compare these figures to February 4 I can see I earned £7.97 p that day with 45 clicks, 5700 page views

Your pageviews have more than tripled; that's quite a fluctuation. Are you aware of a reason for it, e.g. being featured on Reddit or a popular social media channel? Social media traffic rarely converts.

After a reasonable weekend, I am back at record breaking low RPM's. US,UK, Canada are doing terrible. Any one an idea on why this is happening since 2, 3 weeks?

wow. Really really bad day. Flabbergasted. Horrific numbers.

Has anyone noticed the new arrow box that Google has been testing on text ads?. It has a white background, grey border and grey arrow. I started seeing it again about 12 hours ago and can still see it across several sites as of right now, so it could be permanent. That being said, this is producing great results for me.

Aniston Dillo

incredibly low RPM just 0.19$. For over 61000 page views get only 11.58$

Man that RPM reminds me of Taboola.

Google, are kidding? Yesterday:
+ 20% more traffic
- crappy CPC
- same numbers of clicks as weekend? ~ 70% of the usual values? I'm missing about 2000 clicks!

Yesterday was absolutely incredible. I ended up with 26,806 impressions, 21,384 page views, 55 clicks and £11.82 p. Bear in mind that page views are normally around 5000 and impressions typically 14,000. Page rpm was 55p and impression rpm is 44p. This is exactly what happens when I get this abnormal amounts of views and impressions, the rpm drops to almost nothing compared to what I'm used. However, it doesn't appear to be affecting my earnings which is strange. So it seems that I'm still getting the same money for clicks, it's just the page rpm is way down.

I checked Google analytics analyst nothing there that pointed to an abnormal amount of hits in the day. Even if I was getting lots of visits from social websites I think that would add to the amount of hits I got. Looks like today going to be a normal day. I don't understand why yesterday was crazy and today's normal, it's just black and white.

If analytics and adsense had a sudden pv mismatch, it may be a reporting bug on the adsense side. It happens once in a while like every 6 months to an year. I once saw a 200%~300% pv mismatch. It amounted to a difference of an inflated 100k pvs for that particular site, so 30k -> 120k if I remembered correctly, with the same lowered RPM to amount to the same amount of $.

I would not be concerned unless it occurs frequently, if it does then I would dig deeper into the cause of it since it may be a code error somewhere or contact adsense support. Usually the reporting pv bug comes with heavily lowered RPM so the resulting $ stays the same. Which makes sense, since it's the end $ that counts. And the bug should almost never last more than a few days to a week. I overlooked my personal case since it was only an 1 day bug.

Generally adsense pv's should always always be lower then the report of analytics because of adblockers and unserved impressions, etc.

Today, adsense is reporting almost 50 times pageviews and impressions on one of my website. Analytics reporting normal traffic. Definitely a major issue and it is destroying all my reporting metrics such as page CTR etc.

Re plummeting RPM and high Pageview numbers - I've been going back and forth with my AdSense rep about this for a couple weeks now. I have vastly inflated pageviews on three sites, which of course make my RPM numbers look much worse than they are. And these inflated pageviews are NOT reflected in either Google Analytics or StatCounter. I had to once again go all netmeg on them and get an escalation to an AdSense engineer before I could get anyone to look at my various screenshots, charts and whatnot, and even with all that, the only thing they would tell me was "bots". Well I know that bot activity is way up; I still don't entirely understand why the bots are only inflating AdSense and not other javascript-based tracking programs, but the bottom line here is - if your AdSense pageviews don't line up with your Analytics or your StatCounter or your other tracking program by a wide margin, your inflated pageviews and displayed RPM are probably not real. Which means the reports are pretty much useless right now. (This is not the first time I've said this) Right now I'm just looking at the bottom line, which is earnings, and throwing all those other numbers out the window, because they don't mean anything.

The one engineer I was talking to did at one point say something to the effect that they were aware of the issue and working on it, but I'm not entirely sure which issue he was referring to.

I'll be glad when I start my trial subscription models up this spring. I'm tired of ads.

Yesterday 17-2 Horrible earnings most low cpc-rpm earnings over last two months ..

All publishers globally can soon be part of Facebook's “Instant Articles” program.

Publishers in the program have the option to either sell or embed advertisements in their articles and keep 100% of the revenue or let Facebook sell ads, with the social media company taking about a 30% cut.

Looks like this will block any other advertising (adsense) and replace with FB ads (mobile only)

You can use your own ads however there are restrictions on how many and where they are placed.

The Instant Articles feature allows articles to load up to 10 times faster as the format keeps readers inside Facebook’s app.

Another money grab and or another nail in the coffin for small and medium publishers.

Freelancers and amateur writers will be able to publish directly to Instant Articles as well and earn money (maybe)

:)