Also, what's weird is that my active view visible has dropped although i removed ads... it's now at 30%, that's gotta be bad right ?

Not good, this could explain your sharp drop in earnings.

What ads did you remove? My guess is that you removed ads from above the fold or near the top of the page. The problem then is that users aren't scrolling to the below the fold ads. This is most likely the case on mobile, where your ads maybe pushed far down the page by the vertical layout. What is the difference in AVV between desktop and mobile?

April is very bad month to cpm. Cpm did drop on 2 time. Down Traffic did down after google update issuance.

After the horrible drop in my earning since 1st April I thought it's a personal case but when I came here and knew that most of you are having the same issue so I can share it with you now. my avg page RPM in the past 8 months ( since I started with Adsense ) was around 0.66$ , and avg CPC was around 0.16$ ... now avg page RPM is 0.33$ ( avg CPC IS 0.08$ ) ... so my earning dropped for around 50% just within few days.

Today is Saturday where it used to be the best day in the week for earning, and usually my avg page RPM for it was around 0.8$, now the rate is 0.33$ which make me feel like Adsense fixed my account on that low rate so instead of sharing 68% of ad profit with me they replaced the role and now they take 68% and leave only 32% to me ! . I'm really frustrated. Do you think I have to wait for more days and the rate will increase again, or I have to start looking for alternative network ?

@NickMNS no actually i removed on ad on mobile below the article, the rest is unchanged
AVV is 26% on mobile and 23% on desktop.
I used to have 40% with almost the same settings in december and january.

Maybe it's because i hide and show ads on mobile/desktop ?

my settings is the following:

desktop: leaderboard top of the page / square ad left to the text in content / big ad in sidebar
mobile: responsive ad top of the page / square ad after 3rd paragraph in content

But, i use an other ad network which is displaying big ads bottom of the page on mobile and in content + taboola

What's weird is that those two other networks are on the rise. not adsense.

March some what crispy, But April always good. It gains good.

Either nobody is clicking, or my stats are completely frozen at the moment

Well, for me is worse than the first days of January.
The payment is record low.

In my niche I believe is the Youtube Boycott Effect.
Payback time for big Media Agencies against Google. The Ad review center is filled with garbage ads, no brand.
No Easter ads, nothing, all dead.

This year has been really odd, as far the overall stats and numbers are concerned.

January has it's usual "Growth spurt" very high page views, though, unlike the Usual January trend(Slight drop off in RPM) my Monthly RPM total was up on the previous January.

Oddly, February payout was well over (about $140 over) end of month calculated estimate(page views times rpm)
Usually, the final payout is somewhere between $5 or $20 dollars under...

Noticed a 15% drop in YouTube Estimated earnings for March, a week after month has ended....it just changed...
Could be some kind of "Balancing the books" for the previous months generosity....

..

Also, For April, seeing some really low impressions to Page view % in Adsense ....the ratio has dropped of quite significantly from the previous month.

So, regardless of a steady increase in page views this month(20% higher than March)) earnings are slightly less than last month.

Lot's of page views, not much Ad engagement.....

@andymorris
AVV means that at least 50% of the ad needs to be visible to the user for 1 second or more. If your AVV is at 25% it essentially means that only 1/4 of your ad impressions are actually being seen by the user. If the user can't see the ad they can't click the ad, so that sucks for you. But this also means for the advertiser that they are paying for ads that are not being seen. So having a low AVV can cause demand for your site to drop.

Possible causes are most of you ads are below the fold (This is not your case) and that users never scroll to them.
Ads are slow to load, so the users scrolls past the ads before they have time to see them.
High bounce rate, where the user leave immediately before the ads load.

I really find it strange that AVV is lower on desktop than on Mobile. Is it possible that there is something wrong with the way ads are displayed on desktop?

Just went and had a quick look....April is currently my lowest RPM Month on record, since starting on YouTube 4 Years ago.

Way lower than the Usually lower performing Januaries..........As mentioned in my previous post, this seems to be tied in with a very low impression vs Page views ratio.....

My main traffic by a long shot, is the United states....so, could be school holiday's and a few other factors kicking in...

Just a well-meaning tip to all: Speculations on Ad Placements, Smart Pricing, SEO, Content, SSL, Layouts, Site Speed, your Account Standings and more is just futile at this time. Why? I'll explain:

Go to your AdSense portal, choose Performance reports, then click the "Custom" tab. If the Custom tab has an "x" you may want to click on that "x" to delete it and start from scratch. Then choose the "Coverage" metric. Choose a reasonable timeframe, for example the last 90 days, and see how the coverage has tumbled. You may also check for the past 2-3 years and discover how it has never before been this low. You may also want to filter for your most valuable geo traffic. For example, Asia is not so bad right now, while the US and Europe is terrible.

As long as the coverage is not close to 100%, it is futile to speculate in any other reasons for low earnings. Coverage is more important than anything else, and it will not help much that everything else about your setup is virtually perfect in this situation.

Even 99% coverage is so much worse than 100%. Why? Because if you see 100% coverage (or realistically something like 99,8% due to technical reasons), it means that the inventory available is anything from 100% to 150%, 200% or theoretically even 300% or more. And because AdSense is auction based, prices/earnings will *only* increase/stay high when the inventory is above 100% and the auction competition sets in. Now, when the inventory is well below 100%, the prices/earnings will just sink and sink and sink as there is no mechanism in an auction system that will keep the prices/earnings up.

Me myself I do lots of AdWords advertising, and the price for advertisements are now at an all time low, and it keeps on getting lower every day. Because I don't have any competitors for the advertising space. Good for advertisers, bad for publishers.

@stateofmind the experience you describe seems to be specific to your own site. My coverage is steady at 60%, where I set it using ad-balance feature and as a result my earnings have be as strong as ever. This experience has been shared by several users here. I urge you to checkout the ad-balancer thread.

Essentially, the ads that populate the range between 60% and 100% of coverage (these percentage are specific to my site so the range may vary for others) earns the publisher next to no money. They consist mostly of ads used to fill the space when there is not sufficient demand to use up your full inventory. These ads often tend to be spammy and low quality and are both distracting and off-putting to users. I speculate that allowing these adds to appear on your site will reduce the overall CTR as it causes ad blindness. Other here have successfully implemented backup affiliate links that fill the space left blank by the low coverage, leading to further increase of revenue.

@NickMNS you do of course have a good point there, but I have been with AdSense for more than 10 years, and I have never before experienced what I experience now. Also, this correlates with what I see on AdWords. I pay roughly 30% per conversion now compared to 3 months ago. My campaigns are the same, and so are the landing pages. The only thing I do is to reduce my bids several times per week. And the more I reduce them, the more conversions I get with my budget (which is the same). And this "trick" has never worked for me before. At least not this well.

I do not use the ad-balancer. I tried it once, but it didn't work well for my sites. So, my comparison today and before is with having the ad-balancer at 100%. In your case, if you are using ad-balancer, I believe it is extremely difficult and perhaps even impossible to interpret the coverage statistics.

For example, my current coverage is now around 89-90% overall, and if I'd set the ad-balancer at 60%, I think it would not be possible to see what I now see - I think the coverage would be 60% regardless of the "available inventory" being 70%, 90%, 100% or 200%. I may very well be wrong - I do not have much experience with this.

For the record, I get a few million page views per day, so the statistics I see should be relevant and I never see (very) sudden day-to-day variations; just steady trends (and right now those trends are baaad).

Then choose the "Coverage" metric. Choose a reasonable timeframe, for example the last 90 days, and see how the coverage has tumbled.

You may see that but I don't. My coverage is pretty much unchanged since the first day of 2017. So is AVV. The problem for me seems to rest with poor ad quality and very low EPC.

I don't normally post in these monthly AdSense discussion but this month has been so low and unusual. With no changes on my end, my revenue dropped daily from Apr 1 to today. Looks like the new normal is being down 20-25% on earnings.

Would adjusting the ad balance setting cause my active viewable # to go up?

@Swammy007 it could in theory if your below the fold ads were performing consistently worse then the ATF ads. But in practice, at least in my case I have not seen a change.

@Swanny007

Ad balancer setting will cause the active viewable # to go up indefinitely. But, this value does not correlate to the actual earning. Here's my experience:

When I set my ad balancer at user experience level. Many not actively viewed ads stop showing altogether. This means that they get removed from the active viewability calculation. In theory, adsense will prioritize impressions that are actively viewed, as they earn the most money. This comes inline with the effect of ad balancer, less ad impressions while generating same revenue.

My ad balancer value is roughly 10% of ads earn 100% money. I set it as such, impressions indeed drops by 90% as well as the coverage. The "active view %" goes up by roughly 50%. So there is definitely a relationship / correlation between revenue and active viewability. However, I do "feel" that some revenue is lost due to aggressive ad balancer settings, for one the actual # of raw clicks drop considerably by 30~40%. But these are probably clicks that earn pennies, there is simply no way to tell. One can only guess that is the case, because the average CPC indeed rises by about 50~100%.

(Again, when all said and done, the actual earning remain the same due to less impression served.)

In terms of April revenue, almost everyone is seeing lowered earning this new quarter. I am seeing somewhat of a recovery starting this past 2 days however.

In short, ad balancer should not be used as a way to generate higher revenue within adsense itself, unless there are proper back up ads or other revenue channels (may it be affiliate or house). (not considering this function have capability to stop some low hanging spammy ads being triggered, as you can't really quantify user experience / earnings gained due to lack of spammy ads)

Swanny007, I played with the ad balancer about 2 weeks ago and then ended up with this early April record low earnings, so I panicked and resetted it back to 100%, but it hasn't helped either. I don't know if it has something to do with the youtube boycott, but it seems advertisers are gone.

Koan.

I do think this may have something to do with the boycott, as a larger number of channels with no sensitive or controversial content whatsoever, are also being hit very hard...and have seen massive revenue drops, since the boycott started...

Those large companies threw the challenge down to YouTube, basically saying " Until you clean up your act, we're holding off with our advertising dollars...."!

So, in the big hurry to clean up the mess, many compliant channels who are well within the guidelines, are being punished...

The word is that, once the clean up is complete and the main culprits are dealt with, along with a large number of dodgy bogus, spam channels, who are also being targeted, then the big advertisers trust in YouTube will have been restored...and balance within the YouTube Ecosystem will also have be restored...so that legit channels revenue should begin to pick up again....

I think if you are a big important website with millions of visitors then you don't really have anything to worry about because advertisers will still want to use you for their advertising.

It would be interesting if some of the guys from the big guns, Mashable.com for instance with tell us how they are getting on with AdSense. Maybe they could tell us if earnings have dropped considerably in the last year or so. If it's happening to them then there is not much hope for the small guys :-)

I earnings seem to be levelling out again this month. Slightly below what I will consider to be the normal nowadays, but certainly not the end of the world. Media.net has also dropped down a bit, but that seems to have levelled off slightly. My hit rate dropped off dramatically for a few days, however in the last two or three days it's been rising slowly each day. So hopefully we'll get back to where we are comfortable.

Recently AdSense ads have stopped showing on my iPhone. Still OK on iPad and desktop, just not iPhone. I'm using responsive ads. Anybody else?

@play Bach, some of my adsense are also nowhere to be seen on iphone. Not all of them, but some of them (didn't change anything)

They show up on Chrome for iphone though, but not Safari.

I'm an affiliate of 2 top 20 Publishers by US traffic according to Quantcast. I get paid through revenue share, so I have access to CPM data which they report and CPM's have dropped from March to April by 17% for 1 and 15% for the other. They obviously don't just use Google to monetize their traffic, they have header bidding setup with all the big Ad Partners as well taboola type ads etc.

It seems like lately the drops at the beginning of the new year, new quarter and new month are steeper and lasting longer.

The Facebook and Google Duopoly has been getting a lot of press lately,
I read somewhere all the growth by Google the past few years has been in their search ads on mobile, desktop use peaked a while ago, and not display ads (i.e. adsense),
I suspect that besides remarketing, the ads that follow you around the internet, publishers are feeling this switch of advertising dollars going to Facebook.
We really need to treat Facebook as the enemy, their business model relies on their visitors staying on their facebook and leaving only through paid clicks, and unless you rely on them for your traffic maybe it's time to stop promoting your facebook page on your website, why are we giving them free advertising?

"their business model relies on their visitors staying on their facebook and leaving only through paid clicks"

Just like Google

I think it's six of one and half a dozen of the other when it comes to Facebook. If a visitor to your website clicks on the share button then obviously all these person friends may come and visit your website.

But I can see what you mean, a Facebook share button is great for Facebook because it's basically a free pathway straight to their own website.

"their business model relies on their visitors staying on their facebook and leaving only through paid clicks"

Just like Google

True, and Facebook Instant Articles and Google's Amp have the same goal. To keep mobile visitors on the platform they just clicked away from. A user on Facebook's app click on a article, it loads fast and within Facebook, the user has a positive experience on Facebook, next time they see an article from your website within Facebook they click again. Facebook wins because the user had a good Facebook experience. Your website wins thanks to Facebook.
Same with AMP, only difference is Google's app is the same app as the publisher, the browser. We want mobile visitors to use the browser app on their phone, because it's our app as well.

April off to a very slow start. But media.net is good and content.ad is great.

It's 11 April... page RPM keep dropping although my traffic is growing !

Going down like a rock, it's like a damaged submarine.

Another problem besides low CPM is that since Friday my CPC dropped artificially by 30%.
You can say it's the quality of the ads etc, but I have steady figures for years. When Google makes an "optimisation" it's clear => fewer clicks taken into consideration.

And I've got new spammy e-mails"

Invitation to apply for Google Adx – The premium version of Adsense.
We are syndicators for Google AdX. AdX is the premium version of Adsense and typically delivers publishers a 50% increase in display revenues.

We are using AdX since the beginning. It's no miracle.

So i tried ad balance again for a few hours, and the CPC dropped drastically when i set it to 48% of ads (100% revenues). When i pushed it back to 100% of ads, within a few minutes, CPC went up by almost a double.

So, in my case, i would not recommend it. 100% is the way to go for now.