I wonder if the low earning has got to do with sheer number of blank ads that's appearing on my sites

Any chance you have old code on https pages? If so, ads won't show in Chrome.

@MrSavage have the exact same problem. Sites are UK informational, 98% of traffic is UK, ads in the review centre are 50/50 English to non English. I do have to say I've rarely seen a non English ad being displayed on any of the sites, but why so many in the review centre?
It would be great if you could block ads based on geographical area!

Okay guys, we're in recovery. I can confirm that the biggest drop is mostly due to loss of Nessie (arrows). We have them back and we are doing much better!

This might be a change in Googles invalid click algorithm. It is more sensitive. So if you have adboxes that accidently get clicked on. Do something about it and you might recover like we did. Might also help emailing adsense support to make sure all your ad units are good.

We minimized the invalid clicks by adding AD or SPONSORED LINK above the ads that generated the most invalid clicks. Try to do the same and give it a week!

After 6 decent days, back to mediocracy?

I've been tracking updates closely this month and every day has followed a peculiar pattern...

First hour after 12am PST - a flood of clicks and money.

Next 2-3 hours - earnings recede but the RPM remains fairly high.

Then, an hour or so of red bar, where the clicks and RPM are wound back to the pitiful early 2016 levels we've come to know and hate.

After that things remain fairly constant for the rest of the day, with little or no major surges in clicks or RPM.

It's like the flood of the clicks in the first hour wakes up the Adsense elves, who come out to beat everything down with sledgehammers.

Bizarre.

Trebuchet -- I've noticed the same thing because I'm often up at that time. Between 2:45 to 3 a.m. central time, the RPM goes really high, past $10, and then eventually floats back to the average for the day, often remaining stuck at around 9 to 10 a.m.

I can tell whether or not a day is going to be good by 10 a.m.

Having a really good day here! Love it! :)

red bar killing me every single day, why just it can't go away :(

What are these arrows that you are talking about?

The arrows on the buttons of text ads. Some have seen them disappear, others have seen them change, shape, color and size.

About an hour back we got Text Ads with buttons back on 2 of our website. Though Ads are still bad and repetitive.

Arrow is back on most of my site but still missing on the one which makes money. Hopefully it will be back soon as well.

What are these arrows that you are talking about?

The big arrows on the text ads. Seems that they disappeared on desktop on a lot of sites around April 1st.

Well, yesterday I saw arrows again on my sites, but the payment is very low...
This weekend seems to be another bleach one...

Arrows gone from our site again, argh....either we are right at the cutoff or Adsense is doing random testing!

When people are saying they are seeing a red bar. Is this the one about delayed reporting or something else.

The only red bar I get every now and then is to tell me that reports are delayed

@romerome yes, and its happening to me as I am typing, every single day about this time it shows up in my account... o_0

Last month average CPC 40 cents plus - This month average CPC a tad over 30 cents - next month ?

Next month, adsense doesnt pay you, you pay adsense!

Arrows back again for us. Only thing i changed was to remove an experiment that ran text ads only. Preliminary thoughts indicate that this is purely an invalid click punishement. So if you run text links only. They might produce too many invalid clicks. Switch to both text and image and the invalid click ratio should be less along with more inventory. You just have to stick with it until your ratio becomes good again and arrows show.

But then the funny thing is. When arrows start to show again, your invalid clicks will increase and you are at the risk of having the arrow removed again. Lol.

I've spoke with a friend that works for a pretty big real-time bidding agency.
It seems that Google changed something to the way that the exchange services worked, so now is unofficial boycot of Google Ad services.

2 1/2 years ago I was making anywhere from $700, up to nearly $1000 a month. Even then I kept telling myself it probably wouldn't last and I wasn't wrong. Nowadays I'm lucky if I make $350 each month. But that money comes from a hobbyist website and I've always looked at it as just a little bit extra in my pocket each month. It all disappears tomorrow then it's nice while it lasted. Like many other people my earnings have taken a massive drop and I just don't understand it. Sometimes I can look at clicks and they are earning pretty good money, but a lot of clicks are just a few pence says no wonder earnings are so low. I suppose it's my niche, it's not really worth much. But it's all I've got, I'll just have to grin and bear it.

Lot of red bars today.

Good news is arrow is back for all my site including the money site. bad news the red bar happening as I am typing same time as yesterday, and ads are bad really bad :(
I am guessing we will see lots of up and down this month, hopefully next month will be stable :)

@Mentat

Who's boycotting who? RTB networks boycotting adsense? or Adsense refusing to server RTB network?

From what I've understood, Adsense never worked very well with other systems, but in winter, Google made a change that severely cut the informations provided to the partner networks (Ad exchange).
It's like the big agencies had enough of Google and they decided to boycott them.

For You Tuber's, Big Changes were announced in August last year, to take effect in January 2016.

Google took their YouTube inventory off double click Ad X(exchange)

Even though, they said this would only affect a small percentage of the market(5%) it most definitely has taken it's toll on a number of publishers.

Here's a small snippet from one of the articles back then.

“For advertisers, this is an unfortunate development as they are now effectively prohibited from buying non-skippable video ads and from using data for targeting on YouTube,” said Brett Wilson, co-founder and CEO of TubeMogul, a programmatic ad platform."

It was stated that advertisers who lean heavily on this part of the "Double click" network advertising would be affected starting the end of 2015

Here are tow articles discussing these changes

Media Post
Google To Take YouTube Inventory Off DoubleClick AdX

Wave Digital Media
Understanding Why Google Took YouTube Inventory Away from the DoubleClick Ad Exchange

Hi guys. Even though I don't run a website, I just wanted to share my experiences with AdSense/AdMob so that you know that you're not alone. One of the apps that I've developed uses Google AdMob to display ads. I have a mix of both banner and interstitial ads. The last two weeks of March 2016 I was averaging about $0.40 per click. When the 1st of April 2016 rolled around my average CPC is now $0.07. In that time, my app has gained popularity and is resulting in more ad impressions and more clicks, but the revenue is a fraction of what it used to be. This is very disheartening and makes me question using AdMob on an ongoing basis especially since I'm releasing another app in the next week or two. So in summary, it looks like whatever Google did to f$%@ up revenue, they didn't discriminate between web and mobile.

@jjoz

$0.40 is a pretty high cpc for Admob already. I doubt it will ever be higher. Are you running a financial app?

I've a friend who does, and his cpc is around there and has always been. He hasn't reported of any cutbacks lately though...