Oh Whoopie Doo Google ... 6 hours into a Gday and I have zero clicks and an rpm of 0.12p, awesome stuff, just how do you do it so well?

Ah well it is Friday 13th:-)

Funny how desktop traffic is now premium traffic. I also have a smart phone, like most people nowadays, I just don't get how it got to replace so much of the previous desktop web browsing instead of adding to it, it's cramped, slow, often frustrating. It's fine to get that specific info on the go, but more in depth reading? Must be a generational thing.

I don't think it's about the difficulty of reading (I'm no spring chicken, and I can read properly-formatted pages just fine on my old iPod Touch 4G, which is equivalent to an early iPhone). IMHO, it's more about the context in which mobile devices are used. Much of the growth in mobile traffic has been for things like "social."

The importance of environment shouldn't be ignored, either. Even when a mobile user is flicking through, say, a news site, his or her attention is likely to be less focused than a desktop user's. He might be watching TV, chatting with friends, waiting for a bus, etc. instead of sitting at a desk or table with all of his attention directed at the screen. That makes the mobile audience more like the broadcast radio audience than (for example) a magazine audience, so RPM (especially bids for CPM ads) is likely to suffer.

I see better, normalized earnings so far today. Yesterday was above average. Good luck on Fri 13th is so Google like.

@NickMNS, where did you study math?

I'll simplify for the masses. Numbers are imaginary to give an idea what is happening.

Say, you earned $1000/month on 10000 visitors. That's 10 cents per visitor.
Now you are earning $100/mo on 6000 visitors. That's less than 2 cents per visitor, 1.7

That's robbery.

No amount of "investing in your site" with marginal improvements can fix it, only what we in math call an improvement by an order of magnitude, which is 10 times. << This issue has been covered for a long time by FUD.

Granted, some of this income may have disappeared due to other factors - bad economy, charging advertisers crazily unrealistic $2-$4 /click unsustainable fees and not handling click bots (so advertisers don't make money and leave) and other factors. The significant order of magnitude exists here though that warrants other questions.

Earnings, RPM etc are better today. I turned on vignette ads 3 days ago and am underwhelmed. So far I've made .01 USD lol!

Hunh; my RPM on the vignettes is over $11, and the EPC is close to a buck a click. Better than I expected.

@smilie it is really funny to see other people's perspectives

Say, you earned $1000/month on 10000 visitors. That's 10 cents per visitor.
Now you are earning $100/mo on 6000 visitors. That's less than 2 cents per visitor, 1.7

I checked this ratio on my site, and I am earning about 1/2 a cent per visitor.

I have only been doing this for a couple of years, so I have never seen the days of 10 cents per visitor. My perspective would certainly be different if I once did have those earnings.

The difference between you and me is that you do not believe that an order of magnitude increase in traffic is possible, whereas I still believe that it is for my site. Maybe I am delusional.

Pathetic again. Not a single mobile click today. Very frustrating when my traffic is as good as ever.

Complaining on here may be pretty pointless, but Google just irks me that much more in providing no support and going on as if everything is hunky dory.

If the past few day's stats continue on Monday and Tuesday, will completely remove them from my main site and replace with something hopefully with some consistency.

I've been trying vignettes also on a site for a week now, I'm getting around $5 RPM, which is decent for mobile traffic on this particular site, but probably not interesting enough to justify annoying my visitors with these type of popups. We'll see. Sometimes I regret not being more aggressive in the past while it was good and secure more savings, I've always been conservative, but I just can't put on my sites what annoys me as a visitor on other sites.

I had a very "normal" earnings day. The kind of pace and rise that which is what I have been used to seeing in the past before the S storm. It was calm. It was steady. It was eerie actually. Like in the past, I knew early in a day how thing would go. After enough time you get a feel for what you're making or not making. I have to go way way back to find a day like this. Just slow and steady and decent (based on the new lowered expectations).

I got 2 superb days. Did Adsense turn the turbo on or something? US traffic and RPM very decent.

Today is an all-time low, probably the worst I've had three or four years. It seems that my new layout has not worked at all. In fact, yesterday's media.net earnings were slightly more than my AdSense earnings. As far as I'm concerned media.net is the way to go now. I was reading under Fat Stacks blog that media.net performs very well on mobile devices. I never thought I'd say, but I may be leaving AdSense behind if I can't improve things very soon. It's just not worth having all those ads in place for a measly three quid a day.

I feel like AdSense are rubbing my nose in it. I decided that I am going to remove one of the AdSense units from each page and put in a 600 x 250 media.net unit, probably just below the menu. So what is displaying on the first page I changed? Exactly the same advert as AdSense is displaying. But to make matters worse, this is a 336 x 280 rectangular unit so it looks really out of place. So incredibly annoying.

I've always been conservative, but I just can't put on my sites what annoys me as a visitor on other sites.

Me, too. Vignette ads are too much like interstitials for my taste.

Mobile CPC around mid 20 cents
Desktop 40 cents plus

That sums up the state of Adsense for 2016

Incredulous ... An entire Saturday and I get 11 clicks and 74p ($1.06).

Obviously this is removal time however I have to leave the ads there until I get to the minimum payout level which probably means the end of June which will be the 13th anniversary of AdSense starting, June 18th 2003.

How about this. My first-ever day with AdSense, and I only partially implemented it to test it, and I had 38 clicks for £3.14, let's say $4.71, on one site.

For those of you who have seen such a drastic downturn, go to your reports and type in your starting date and just look at the graph and the numbers above, unreal.

I have been swapping my AdSense units around for a while now trying to find a layout that starts increasing my earnings. However, nothing seems to have been working. On the other hand, media.net is improving slowly. So yesterday I thought it would make sense to concentrate a little bit more on media.net, try and optimise my layout and maybe reduce the amount of AdSense units I have to see what happens.

Media.net policies are very similar to the AdSense whereas you are allowed three units per page. I found that the wider unit seem to perform better, especially the 600 x 250 unit which I have at the bottom of nearly all my pages. So what I've done is put a slightly smaller unit underneath most of my horizontal top menu. I've always been very keen on fairly aggressive AdSense layout switch have worked mostly. But I think it's time to start stripping them out and maybe just keeping one unit per page on some of my articles. I'm mainly using the 300 x 600 unit which I have embedded within the text. Some longer articles have to of these units, most of them only have one. On some of the shorter articles where one of these units would be to break I have put in a 300 x 250 rectangular unit, although I'm not expecting these to perform that well. I'll probably leave them in place for a week to see how much money I earn from them, if not much happens then I will try something else. Yesterday's earnings were actually slightly up on the last few days so removing a lots of my ad units didn't seem to affect things, in fact I actually earned a bit more. What I'm hoping will happen is because I only have the one ad units on a lot of the pages, I will get more money per click.

Anyway, check my new layout out. You will see how well the media.net integrates in with my site colours. You will also sing that media.net displays extremely relevant keywords to my actual website niche.

I notice that the arrow came back on some of my ads, I'm hoping that this is going to carry on

[s205.photobucket.com]

[Oscarfishlover.com...]

You will see how well the media.net integrates in with my site colours.

So well, in fact, that they'll probably be confused for navigation.

You will also sing that media.net displays extremely relevant keywords to my actual website niche.

That's just click bait. I clicked "Buy Cichlid Fish" and got an ad for wedding dresses. Clicked "Best Fish Food" and got an ad with the title "5 Mini-Meals That Kids Will Love". Useless. The AdSense ads weren't terribly relevant either but at least they don't lead me up the garden path.

I thought the same thing about media.net. However, when I set up units, media.net then made all the fine adjustments on my behalf so that they fit in with my websites overall look. They have done it on all of my sites that have media.net. They pay a lot of attention to the colours in the logo for instance and match the units so they blend in nicely.

I don't click on the media.net adds myself, but when I have done in the past everything is relevant to the niche. I think it really depends on the individual and what your browsing history happens to be. I see an awful lot of ads displaying website selling watches. This is because I collect watches and visit sites quite a lot. Anyway, this is the first full day with the new layout, let's just see what happens. What I think I will do is redefine the description in the channel that is connected to the large 300 x 600 AdSense unit and make sure that any advertisers know that if the only one on a lot of the pages so they may want to bid for that space since its of the only one on the page.

My RPM is increasing as U.S. and global ranking improve. It really seems to make a difference once a website gets into the top 5000 sites. The frustrating thing has always been to see crappy sites with obvious clickbait content or thin content appear ahead of mine in the SERPs, but there has been less of that lately. Perhaps Google is starting to get it together again.

The competition in my niche continues to increase. It gets harder and harder to keep ahead of the pack. I think we're all feeling competitive pressure from larger companies and organizations, especially nonprofits who don't run ads.

@robzilla, I agree. These are the types of ads that ad-blockers were created for.

99% of the ads that I see on people's websites are completely irrelevant at the end of the day. The amount of adverts I see advertising Google themselves is ridiculous, who on earth is going to click on one of those you are visiting fishing website? Obviously my media.net ads are working because people are clicking on them and my earnings are slowly increasing, whereas Google is going in the opposite direction.

Looks as though I may have chosen the best approach by just having one or two 300 x 600 ad units per page, or maybe a smaller 300 x 250 on a smaller article. I'm not sure if you are referring to my website when you suggested that ad blockers were created for these type of ads. Ad blockers were created for any types of ad, not just a specific type of ad. Just like the kettle was created for adverts on the television :-)

99% of the ads that I see on people's websites are completely irrelevant at the end of the day.

How can you possibly know that, with behavioral ads being so important a part of the AdSense mix these days? We're no longer living in the era of pure "contextual" CPC ads.

@Ironside, of course people are clicking on the ads, they cannot tell the difference between what is an ad and what is your content. This is short term gain for long term pain. Your users will hate you for these type of deceptive tactics. If you've got users to loose then great. But I work really hard to get people to my site, the last thing I want to do is make them feel deceived once they have arrived. I like when my users tell their friends and share my content, and mostly comeback.

I do not understand why Media.net would adopt such a strategy, it pretty guarantees that the advertisers will not get an ROI on their advertising dollars. There must be enough advertisers that only care about clicks and nothing else to support their business model.

99% of the ads that I see on people's websites are completely irrelevant at the end of the day.

Can you elaborate as to what you are basing this statement on, is this based on your experience surfing the web, you viewing pages on your own site, or based on the review of ads in the Adsense ad review center?

I am at least glad to know that I am not the only one!

My Adsense RPM has been getting lower and lower every week through this year. I have been doing big changes and bringing ads up and into active view.

This has done nothing! When doing these changes, it seems to be higher paying for a day or two before reverting back to the low paying clicks. Is somebody throttling me!?!?!

Last year Adsense was my highest paying, by far. Nobody could come close!

This year, it's the lowest paying network, by far. It can't even come close!

Some of the same ad positions through Adsense are bringing 10x lower earnings than from other publishers.

I have 1 spot that I cannot seem to get above .15$ RPM, when other networks pay well over $2.00 for this same spot.

It's really blowing my mind and I am not sure what to think.

Adsense receives the most ad impressions on my website and has all of the best spots. Yesterday, my second network made more than Adsense with half the impressions.

Keep in mind, this other network does not have ads in the content. There ads are only on the right hand navigation....

What's funny is....

With all of these low paying rpm's and clicks, I thought maybe it's prime time to start an ad campaign...

When I advertise through Adwords, I do not get the same rate of low clicks that my website seems to send others. I'm paying 8x more.

And all of my clicks seem to come from the few same websites, their "authority" websites, that have ads that look exactly like page content and have a 10%+ impressions to click ratio and do not even view the page for a second before navigating away.

What's going on here!?!?!\

The way I am doing things now is this. I am giving Adsense the lousiest positions on my site just to get over minimum payment each month, and am really pushing affiliates now. It makes total sense to do something like this. Yesterday I got a £29 affiliate sale and today a £7 one from one of my sites, now if this had been Adsense on this site I might have made £2 or less for both days.
If you cannot reach minimum payout by putting Adsense in lousy positions then you should probably not be doing Adsense anyway.
By the way, like mentioned by me and some others in the past, I now see no difference in earnings wherever I place Adsense, in bad positions, or in good positions, it makes no difference, this is because Adsense is fixed haha

I suspect foul play Steven. There is no way that Google are paying 68% to us per click.

If you look through their financials they only highlight marginal drops over like 2 years and yet since Jan my CPCs have dropped by 50%+ and others on here seem to suggest the same.

It's hard to accept that the AdSense dream is over, but it really has hit the skids in 2016. I'm just hoping that the affiliate side picks up for me now that AdSense is on the breadline. Ain't gonna be a fun summer.:(

Really feels scammy - I talk to people buying via adwords and they are 5-10$ a click - I dont recall seeing anything like that in publisher payouts, not that Google seems able to even serve ads properly.

Utter garbage again today - i'm slowly removing units day by day - its not worth putting up with the headaches google adsense causes to site owners if the payout is terribly low.

Wow just checking the bull**** thats being served to my sites via adsense:

[laughdaily.net...]
[lmaolab.com...]

Google using my placements to advertise sites that blatantly break their own rules - nice :/

One of the biggest mistakes I made when I first started putting AdSense on my website was using bright bold colours, basically making the ad units stand out like a sore thumb. I learned very quickly that in order to have some degree of success with AdSense you have to blend the ad units so they fit in with your content. Now I don't know any other way to interpret "blending" other than making the AdSense unit look like it's part of your website.

On one hand we are told to blend content in, but then you're told you're not allowed to trick people into thinking that your AdSense are part of a menu. Anyone who uses the Internet on a regular basis should be able to tell the difference between what is advertising and what is part of your menu. But there are probably millions and millions of people out there who will click on anything because they can't distinguish between what is an ad and what is part of your website, in my opinion that's where 90% of our revenue comes from. I can say that with confidence because I know I will never ever click on adverts

Media.net are very good in my opinion, they work with each individual and personally match the ad units to the colour of your website. So I'm not doing anything wrong with locating the ad unit underneath the horizontal menu. They've obviously seen what my menus look like, if it was against the rules than they wouldn't go to the trouble of matching them. Also, does it matter if somebody clicks on an ad unit thinking it's a menu? With media.net you will only earn money if they then carry on clicking on ads once they have clicked on a menu item. Obviously it's different with AdSense so you have to be a little bit more careful. Having said that, the link units look exactly the same as text links on your website so there is another grey area there.

What I mean by ads being irrelevant is that when you visit a website that has AdSense, none of the AdSense have absolutely anything to do with the subject of the website. For instance, I've just been reading an article about blending AdSense on somebody's blog. They had two 728 x 90 banner is located at the top and bottom of the page. The first banner was something to do with downloading using PDF. The banner at the end of the content was something to do with UK Forex trading, God knows what that is all about, but it doesn't have anything to do with AdSense blending as far as I can tell, again totally irrelevant to the subject of the website blog.

I use a website called XE.com to convert US dollars into GBP. One would expect a website like this to display relevant ads, no no, they are showing ads for flybe, an online website for booking plane tickets. The reason I'm seeing these ads is because I recently booked some plane tickets for my mother using that website. Again, it's totally irrelevant, what is the point of showing me ads for a website I already know about?