To be honest, I don't really care what ads are showing, if it is earning me money then that's what counts at the end of the day.

I used to hold the same view. But what I realized is that ad displayed reflect on the user perception of the quality and trustworthiness of the content. Simply put, if your site has spammy ads some users (possibly many) will think your content is spam, even if it is not. This in turn means that users are less likely to return to your site, link to your site, and share content to your site.

So yes there is a cost to blocking ads, but in my view there is a bigger cost to not blocking ads. My experience has shown that the benefits of increased traffic far outweighs a few pennies of added CPC.

The way I look at things is that if you are providing information that people are looking for, and have found on the first page of Google then adverts are not going to put them off using your website. The only time I would leave a website is if my user experience is ruined by ads popping off in front of me when I'm trying to read something, that really gets my goat.

I have been experimenting with different ads for many years now and I believe I have found the best for my website. Ever since implementing things have improved. My opinion is that if you want to make money from your website then sometimes adverts have got to be in your users face. I don't believe in hiding adverts away because some of your guests might get annoyed. The majority of us have gone to a lot of trouble to provide information for people, if they don't like my adverts then I'm afraid that's just tough. Because I do fit into quite a small niche, I know that any number of phrases are going to bring people straight back to my website.

Last month did extremely well. This month seems to be on track to do almost as good....

Not a bad day yesterday, into double figures with a page RPM of £4 an impression RPM nearly £2. This is as good as it was when I was earning big money. The only difference is I'm not getting as many clicks, if I was that I would be getting earnings like they were three years ago.

How it is even possible to get that high rpm? My adsense has been below .50p for 5 years.

It seems that things have improved since I left all my ads in place and didn't keep moving them around. My top earning ad is a 300 x 600 which probably earns the lion's share of my monthly earnings.

The lowest page RPM I've had this month has been £1.82, the highest £4.11.

Don't misunderstand me, I'm not earning hundreds of pounds each month. This month daily earnings are mostly in single figures, but close to double figures. I've had a few days this month where daily earnings have gone into single figures. There was a period where I was well into double figures every single day and several hundred pounds a month. Alas those days have gone, but my earnings have really fluctuated. At the moment things seem to be improving, but you have to take each month as it comes.

My RPM is fluctuating between $3 and $4. In the good old days it was up around $8 consistently.

Wildly inconsistent. Off the charts yo-yo style. I recon the enthusiasm here is going the way of the Google SEO forum. In this case, words (or lack thereof) say where things are at for most people. I am happy (relatively speaking) because I've replaced Adsense earnings with better "partnership" programs. I've said it before but the day Google stopped caring about SERPS is the day they could afford not to give a S about Adsense. It's tied together obviously.

I'm in the process of changing every ad unit I run (and it's hundreds maybe thousands across a lot of sites) to text only. The images have just gotten out of hand, and when I go into my review center, the belly fat and disgusting images are just too numerous to block. I'm seeing tons of the same ads I have been blocking for years, only on different URLs. And it's too bad, because image ads (in season) do really well for me in the travel/vacation/leisure space. But somehow the craps ads are getting through (and even blocking categories doesn't seem to help - making me wonder whether the categorization is being manipulated) and there isn't enough time in the day to find them all and block them individually.

@netmeg, I hear you loud and clear. But I am not sure that blocking image ads will be enough to solve the problem. As I posted on the last post of the previous page I am seeing a lot of spammy text ads too. So I have started reporting spam to Adwords by clicking the little icon in the top right, I'm not sure if it will do anything but it is worth a try.

This month is still going strong, I am set to have my best month ever.

Also, I have noticed far viewer ads appearing in the ad review center. I check my ads daily (to block the spam) and usually get about 10 to 12 pages of new ad units (21 units per page), over the past few days this has been down to 4 of 5 pages. I don't know if this due to fewer ads appearing more often, or due to a delay in showing the ads.

I'm not as worried about spammy text ads. But the disgusting image ads really stand out. (And AdWords is perfectly happy to take almost anyone's money)

The last two days have been quite disappointing, I thought I was on our role. Not sure why all of a sudden earnings are almost halved each day. AdSense is so fickle, if it was a person you wouldn't want to know it at all :-)

Rollercoaster, it was the best of times
Rollercoaster, it was the worst of times, too
Because you lift me up so high, high, high
It's the most unbelievable ride

>Ironside

Yesterday was the worst day for RPM I have seen in a few months for one of my sites. Today is back to normal. Not sure what happened.

I also had a few subpar days this week (wed-thu mostly), with CPC about 25% lower than I've seen recently. Had me spooked a bit, but it's climbing back up, thankfully. In other news: MIB.

We're seeing more bouncing around than usual this month: some really good days, some so-so days. "Last 7 days" and "Last 28 days" are mostly up, but individual days seem to have bigger peaks and dips.

Not a bad day yesterday, today isn't looking too bad either.

In Google Adsense panel, where can I find the information about the number of invalid clicks? I can only see on the "Performance Page":

Site Impressions Clicks CTR CPC Impression RPM Active View Viewable Estimated earnings

Since invalid clicks directly affect earnings, I would assume this information must be somewhere, but I cannot find it. Maybe it's available to premium publishers only?

I don't think you can see it until the end of the month. It's in the payment history page. Just gives the total dollar amount of invalid activity and deducts it from the amount earned.

I had three days where earnings drops dramatically then I got a bit worried. However, yesterday sprung back dramatically with a page RPM of £3.12 and an impression RPM of £1.09. Today looks like it's going to be even better. At the moment, my page RPM is at £5.56 and my impression RPM is up at £2.02.

My top earning AdSense unit which is 300 x 600 is running at a page RPM of £6.86 an impression RPM at £6.97. Don't think I've ever seen it this high before

Our earnings are back as well.

The number of messages in monthly adsense thread here is inversely proportional to how adsense is performing for most of us. April had 486 msgs (when adsense was pretty bad for almost everyone) while this thread has just crossed over 50 msgs so things seems to be better for most of us this month.

Adsense is giving good results since last 2 months for us as well.

April had 486 msgs (when adsense was pretty bad for almost everyone) while this thread has just crossed over 50 msgs so things seems to be better for most of us this month.

Wow! Really?

Therefore many of those who used to post haven't simply given up, closed down or found it pointless posting since no matter what they did, nothing would improve?

Some publishers are doing fine, some are doing better than fine however many, witnessed by my email account, have seen their AdSense earnings disappear almost completely and they have absolutely no idea why.

Oh, my post count each month used to be 130-150, these days it's 5-6.

Theories for posts or lack thereof? It's pretty simple. Let the Google SEO forum trend speak volumes. If you look back at any forum online that had subject matter that was relevant and interesting, participation is high. Find an online forum that has subject matter that is no longer relevant or interesting and what do you think happens? Silence is not a positive indicator if I'm running a forum.

I think we should start discussing why there are such incredible and wacky fluctuations going on. I was going strong for a good two months, didn't bother posting about it, and then naturally it reverted back to up and down nonsense. I still think that my ads are part of a bigger experiment by Google. They can tweak, test, then change up formats etc to see what works or doesn't work. The end goal being for what they run on their own properties, not how they can create a better click through for me.

Based on what I make a month now and considering that I was part of Adsense in your City and have pulled nice income, the long time employees must be a bit disappointed. They were there trying to help increase earnings. When likely across the board people are dead in the water, what a futile existence that must feel like. Things change sure. When it takes me about 4 or 5 payments now to make one months worth? LOL at that. I now have a better partner program that is filling my pockets quite nicely. Adsense still discourages me, but it does cover some of my minuscule monthly costs.

In the 10 days or so leading up to 5 days ago, earnings were fantastic. I almost couldn't believe it, and was thinking to myself that this couldn't possible last. I was more than 50% up from the "normal" which has been pretty much stable for the past year.

And indeed so: Starting 5 days ago I see the lowest earnings ever in my account; about half of what is "normal". This seems to be caused by poor fill rates. Very few of my ad slots now receive any ads at all. Some pages receives no ands, some just one. And some pages receive ads for all my ad slots (usually 2 or 3 on my pages).

I have used AdSense for more than 10 years, and I have a few million page views per day. I have never seen such drastic fluctuations before, and I have never seen such bad fill rates.

I have always had a theory that Google determines "how much you should be able to make per month" and adjusts everything according to that. In my 10 years, no matter which adjustments I have done, earnings seems to be nailed to som formula. Some call it a glass ceiling... and I guess I can subscribe to that idea.

To me, it looks like Google is tuning down my fantastic earnings earlier this month by feeding me very few ads (lowering the fill rate). And... I would not have come up with such a conspiracy theory had it not been for my very long history with AdSense (with a huge site) where I have seen many strange things going on. In fact, I hate conspiracy theories and find most of them to be ridiculous. But... AdSense behaves like it is more controlled by "AdSense internal rules" than "market rules".

*Sigh*

That was a jarring post. Thanks for posting that. I'm nowhere in your league but it's great to have your perspective and being willing to share your experience as of late.

@stateofmind - the same situation and feeling here.

Anyway, last week was a "nice miracle", but the weekend and Monday was really payment wise.
Things are not looking good for this week.

Earnings back down yesterday and lower today. Odd. My earnings have been relatively stable for months. I have an add on top of one of my adsense ads that passback to adsense.

I think that is possibly the culprit. But all of my adsense ads are down and not just the one.

Did great last week, but suddenly something is screwed up. I don't have time for this anymore. It will take a long time to switch over to media.net but I'm seriously considering it now.