@MrSavage

It looks as though I may beat you today, I'm definitely heading towards a record low!

I hope it's just a delay in reporting. Earning is slow. Aargh.

Heh Redbar there is something freeing about saying how bad it really is. I have no shame anymore. I know that I'm not a joke webmaster nor would I have continued investing time is something so fruitless. I think it's good to be transparent about what bad really means. Give everyone else some perspective. Not that long ago I was pretty consistent 4 figure monthly earnings, or at least on the cusp of that. So when I report that I made 94 cents in a day, it should be speaking volumes. I have been in the midst of messing with ad settings so I can admit it's playing a role at least for the short term here.

@ MrSavage

So when I report that I made 94 cents in a day, it should be speaking volumes.

I could not disagree more. First let me say that I am in a similar position to you, whereas I have not yet reached the 4 figures monthly, I do believe that the site I created and those that are in the works are good quality and worthy of the respect of my peers. That said, the fact that on one day your earnings reached 94 cents is really irrelevant, and basing decisions on day like that is not wise. There is this evil psychology at play, on days when users are clicking on ads en mass, you feel great, "wow free money" and on days when the crickets are out you feel like your in the dumps.

In reality great days and crappy days are the result of same thing, pure randomness. Our work is in large part influenced by randomness, the number of users typing a given keyword into Google's search box can vary wildly, it does generally center around a mean but it still has a random component. Making any kind of decision based on a small number of days is foolish and dangerous. Because, when you start tinkering, by making many little changes, you no longer have any way of determining what is an impact of a change and what is noise and the your out of control.

We are fortunate in our line of work to have vast amounts data readily available. We need to use it wisely and not get lost in it. If you have seen a steady decline of revenue over the years, ask yourself:
When did it start?
Was it gradual?
What was the cause? (drop in traffic, drop in rpm)
Was it just you, one site, many sites, other people sites?

Once you have an idea of the problem, find one solution implement it and see if it fixes the problem. This takes work and time, but you earnings didn't drop over night, so you should not expect to fix them overnight either.

I could not disagree with you more NickMNS

Some of us have been royally screwed-over by Google and its actions, in my case the majority of it was simply by their image grab a couple of years back ... do you think they will EVER give me and all the others who were affected that traffic back, of course they won't.

I've been in AdSense from the very beginning and was a UPS member. For those who do not know, a UPS memnber was one who had their monthly cheque delivered by UPS courier since their earnings were in excess of USD 10,000.00+ per month or 333.00+ a day. Can you imagine what it's like going from 1,000+ clicks a day to 10?

Yesterday I just beat MrSavage with $1.20 ... I have seen my average clicks the last couple of weeks slashed by another 33%, they are now at 33% of a year ago.

Google is deducting valid clicks, I know they are since I have tested them out. Google is keeping all the good ads for itself and doesn't give a flying f**k about most publishers except their f**k buddies.

Trusting Google is the worst thing anyone could do. This in't a rant, it's the reality of what has happened, I accepted a long time back that AdSense was pointless for me, I've left it there so long as it was providing me with a monthly beer cheque ... I'm predicting that this month I shall not even make the minimum pay out therefore you'll not be hearing from me much in the future since I shall have no worthwhile contribution to make.

pure randomness

And this is incorrect ... I can show you stats whereby 90% of my earnings over years were within a 90-110% daily earning rate, it was extremely rare that anything went outside the 80-120% range, and by rare I mean maybe once a quarter, not once a month or on a weekly basis ... but that was those days.

Almost back to normal for May. Amazeballs.

My may has got off to a fairly decent start, better than last month anyway. Media.net is also doing slightly better as well. I think a lot of it has got to do with the fact that I increased the CPUs on my cloud server which has speeded everything up.

How well do Google cooperate with publishers who seek advice about ad placement? I can see that nearly all of my earnings come from mobile traffic, in fact when I look at real time on Google analytics, very rare to see anything but mobile as being the highest percentage of people browsing the website. So it makes sense to optimise my site more for mobile use. But I'm not entirely sure what the best way to go about it is.

March was the first time that our revenue hasn't increased YOY in 5 years of running Adsense. Glad to say that the trend hasn't continued for April and May has also got off to a good start.

@redBar I get your frustration, I think we all do.

I have only been doing this for a few years now and I have never reached the UPS revenue levels. But none the less I feel equally as frustrated. Over the past six of month I totally re-built my site from a-z, improved it in every way. I have seen my traffic more than double, yet my earnings have stayed flat. I could have done something else for six month. So I get it. I am just as pissed as you, especially when I see the crap that my competitors are churning out, and see how much more traffic they get, garnered from shady seo tactics.

My point simply was, you can't use a single bad day as a basis for taking decisions.

Your revenue certainly didn't drop this far as result of Adsense alone. There must also be a drop in traffic as well? One needs to find the issues and address them one by one in controlled and measure fashion.

There must also be a drop in traffic as well?

Absolutely a drop in traffic, most people with the same problem that I had, namely Google's image grab, lost about 90% of their traffic over the ensuing 6 months.

I was getting 100,000+ unique PVs a day, and then about 2011/12 time (I think), Google actually encouraged webmasters to optimise their images better for image seaches and then a couple of years back Google then had their overnight grand image theft and screwed-over thousands and thousands of sites.

At that point I had dropped to about USD 5k per month owing to a much lower CTR and EPC and the story continues, Google kept changing things to their advantage and sod the webmaster who had spent many hours and probably lots of money as well only to be a**shafted again by Google.

FWIW tomorrow is an infamous AdSense anniversary date ... 05/05/05 ... Google has a thing about killing webmasters in May, that date I lost 50% of traffic and income overnight and to this date I still do not know why. I have never, ever once received a single email or notice that said any of my sites were penalised for whatever reason.

Now I'm at the end of the road with AdSense, clicks so far this year have been 50% of 2015, since 26th April, another turning point I would venture, yet another 33% reduction ... pointless, absolutely pointless.

In theory this whole Google thing is a zero sum game, searchers come to Google type in a keyword and get results, if they do not click on your site they are clicking somebody else's. There is of course the situation where Google shows them what they are looking for directly, in which case they don't click any further, but I can't imagine that that accounts for a high percentage of the traffic, unless of course your in a niche like currency exchange. But even here it is all about building value for the users.

Maybe I am naive, I am only a few years into this game, maybe after struggling for 10 years my views will change.

Don't worry about 05/05/05, because to today... May the fourth be with you!

Something changed last Tuesday 26th April, my USA and UK clicks have been way down since, in fact so far today I have not yet had 1 click from either country, that would have been unheard of until a week ago.

Most of my sites do not carry any advertising whatsoever now since I refuse to pollute them with pointless, irrelevant ads, the sooner I get round to doing the others, the better.

Do you want to know something? I've just sold a domain name for more than the last 3 yearsworth of AdSense!

@NickMNS

Once you go through some of the major ups and downs related to Google algo solely, your view might change. Certain aspect to this business is like weather that is almost completely outside of our control. We can only do our best to keep our shop clean and please our visitors in return for their loyal visits.

I still believe the key is to get a grasp of the general trend of things, and stay on top of trends and tech. For example...one of the adsense strategy trend is the nonblending of ads against content. Their system is now programmed to counter obvious blending on content with ads...The infamous arrow disappearance come into mind. So the smart thing may be to avoid going after layouts that encourage those semi-tricky clicks. That may have worked for about an year or so but probably will work less and less.

Another known trend is the wipe out of advertisers in certain verticals. The money has gone somewhere, just not here with adsense anymore. It's the natural progression as well, advertisers chase after ROI's, and if adsense does not offer the right traffic, they go else where that gets better conversions. As time goes on and advertisers learn more about traffic quality, we will see shifts of more verticals. As publishers we have to chase after ad agencies or even direct sells that offer us the money too. So it is a constant tug of war.

I have gone several major revamp of my strategies personally over the past 6 years of doing this. My approach to almost every aspect is completely different than when I first started. It's never business as usual for me, at least not yet, and I expect it to never be.

Seeing slightly lower RPM (~5%) in May compared to April.

frankleeceo: Which verticals do you mean?

Great start but gradually slowing down during this week. Hopefully pick up for the weekend.

A very valid point Linda. If we can be bothered to put together a website for people to browse completely free of charge then the least our guests can do is put up with a few ads.

I hope Mae carries on like it is at the moment. It seems that my daily earnings are very consistent at the moment, let's hope it stays like this

@NickMNS

I would add that there is far less randomness than one may think. People are creatures of habit and routine. My sites stats as well as those I have access to confirm this. I know what visits will look like for a specific season, month, day of week, and time of day. For the most part it is like clockwork.

More lord it's slow today. Come on!

@jrs79
I am not suggesting, that there are not repeatable patterns in web traffic. The degree of variability varies from site to site. In what you describe, you seem to have little variability, lucky you. The key is being able to detect the difference between normal changes due to randomness and a change due to some significant external factor.

Totally and utterly fubard today ... 2 freaking clicks, 1 from UK , 1 from Austria ... that's it ... whatever G has introduced must be culling many AdSensers.

I've already removed AdSense from a further 4 sites, I do not want their pollution!

All I can say this is insane , any small network can beat google CPM. The main problem with other network is the fill rate, or I would replace adsense. if this trend continue then I won't be able to run any site.

May has been a terrible month so far. Clicks are way down.

1. I have 5 sites.
On small 3 sites, my arrows are back, but I rarely see text ads.
On my biggest sites, no arrows yet.

2. With arrows, my CTR increased, but CPC decreased dramatically, so in the I've made even less money!

3. It's like a cancer! After Panda for Search, we have Panda for Adsense!
With the same traffic I was making 1200 USD/day in December, 700-800 USD/day (January-March), 600 in April and 500 now! Is crazy!

FWIW tomorrow is an infamous AdSense anniversary date ... 05/05/05

Insofar as I am concerned 05/05/16 will now most probably go down as the day Adsense finally died.

I shall be leaving ads on some sites to get to the minimum payout level and then it's gone, I'm guessing that will be the end of June since current daily earnings will not achieve the minimum by the end of May ... 1,000+ clicks a day to 2, unbelievable.

We have been doing AdSense for some time. Can someone explain Clawback?

Can someone explain Clawback?

Clawback is when Adsense takes back money they've already credited to you. When mentioned here it usually refers to Adsense's end-of-month deduction for "invalid traffic". They can rip back anything from a couple of dollars to a big chunk of your monthly earnings.

Just to add to Trebuchet's explanation.

Adsense deducts the value of clicks that it deems as invalid. What exactly constitutes an invalid click (and how those clicks are detected) is unclear and up to the sole discretion of Adsense.

Typically one can expect in the order of 1 or 2% of monthly revenue to be clawed back. The 14% claw-back reported by Breeks is unusual.

Thanks guys! Much appreciated.

I have been reading this thread for awhile now and find it very valuable. My site also saw tremendous growth in the first half of 2015 and since then, has been on a downward trend. This helps explain the "Why" to the bosses.

In general, do we know the average revenue for the sites being discusses? Are we talking $50/day, $200, $500, $5,000? Just want to know how we can compare and if trends can be applied across the board.

Thank you!

do we know the average revenue for the sites being discusses? Are we talking $50/day, $200, $500, $5,000?

As far as I can surmise there are webmasters from sites of all sizes here.