EditorialGuy, or anyone else:

" I'm sticking with the 12% coverage, though, because our house ads for the other 88% of impressions are almost certainly worth more than any lost AdSense earnings."

Does anyone know for sure if moving the slider down means the remaining percentage of impressions are filled with house or backup ads or does it just display a blank/empty space? I always assumed it wouldn't default, but just not show anything.

The only thing I can find on AdSense says the following, making it seem like nothing at all will be showed:

What happens to an ad unit when you remove an ad?
When we remove an ad, your ad unit will show as blank.

The removed ads will show backup ads, or nothing if there is no backup ads set in place.

On the topic of April revenue, I wanted to mention that April 1 and 2 were normal for me, then April 3 saw a 20% drop, then April 4 saw an additional 30% drop! I gained about 10% back over the rest of the week, and that's where I've hovered all month.

Did anyone else experience this major drop on April 3 and 4th?

I'm having some absolutely dreadful days this month, yesterday was absolutely diabolical, the lowest I've had in I just don't know how long. Media.net had really started picking up, all of a sudden that's just dropped right down as well. Oh well, such is life.

@child_please just to add to frankleeceo's answer, if you have not setup backup ads then a blank box appears in place of the ad. In other words, the ad space does not collapse it only appears blank. With backup ads set up the backup ads appear each time the Adsense ad is suppressed.

@csdude55 .... Yes me too ... the clear dropping started exactly in 3 April which was 15-20% less than the past days... and the dropping from 3 to 4 April was around 10%. .... but instead of getting anything back the dropping continued in the next days until it was stable in 10 April at 50% of dropping comparing with March. and now I dropped Adsense codes from my site and waiting for the beginning of May to start again.

I'm seeing mostly a continuation of March (comparing to same day last month, with days of the week aligned [starting April 1 compared to March 4]). I think the difference will be felt at the end of the month as March finished strong for me.

I have AdSense on one site, and every time I block a particular crapola ad, it comes back under a different URL. The links all have blogspot URLs. I'm surprised that Google accepts advertising like this (as I'm surprised that they accept ad blocker ads). Anyway, the links open to a shoddily-done home page, and immediately a full-page overlay pops up over it with links to download things that people aren't interested in. There is no way to close out that page, and there is no way to exit the page from a Google Chrome browser. So...I end up having to close down the browser through the task manager. If visitors happen to click on these ads, I doubt that they would return to the site.

BTW, I agree that AS was diabolical yesterday. It has been diabolical since almost the beginning of April, and it gets worse every day.

@Azlinda I totally feel your pain. The secret to eliminating the "crapola": (is "crapola" a word?).
Step 1 - use the ad-balancer, this will eliminate about 80% to 90% of the crap.
Step 2 - Category blocking. Sometime in the past few month Adsense changed the categories to be more precise. You can now block Skin-care products without blocking all Beauty products. From my experience these ads tend cluster in specific niches, such as skin care, celebrity news etc... Adsense reports your earning in that specific subgroup for the past 30 days so you judge whether to block or keep the money. In my case I made no money from the spam categories so the decision was easy.
Step 3 - Check the ad review center regularly, block the spam, rinse and repeated.

I am now 99.9% "crapola" free.

Now that I gloated about it publicly, tomorrow morning my ad-review is going to be oozing with spam...

@NickMNS Crapola is a word that I coined a long time ago. LOL Thank you so much for your suggestions. I will go clean things up at the pub dashboard right now.

Today is again the payment is diabolically low... again.

@Mentat That like I gave your post doesn't mean that I like the content of your post! Tell me about diabolically low. I went from a five figure monthly income to a low three figure monthly income with AdSense since April 7, 2011. This month is the worst I have ever seen in all the years I've been with AdSense. The better I make my websites, the worse it gets. I'm thinking that there may be something to just not doing anything else with the sites. It isn't worth my time anymore.

Looks like April will be my worst month in six or seven years if it carries on like this. Even now I'm not even up to £2 in earnings, what the hell is going on?

Same here, Ironside. This is shaping up to be my lowest month since April 2011. I can't think of any parallels between then and now, though.

On a positive note, after April 2011 I had a steady incline in revenue that didn't peak until 2014, and the peak was roughly 3 times that April 2011 earnings.

Does anyone at Google even read this AdSense forum?

@azlinda - I'm much worse than you!

I have an Adsense rep that I contact.
They really seem to be stupid of not really well informed.
They always ask above for tech questions.
I've told and show them that on US I had 9x% coverage for years, now it's 75% since day X! They don't know what to say, just unblock the "magic and political" sensible categories...

I have -20% compared to the same day last week, and last week was full of Holidays and pre-Easter!
WTF google, give us leverage. I'll move from Adsense to DFP.
From 0.25$/click in December, to 0.2$ in January, to 0.12$/click now!?

This is peanuts! The Google boycott will finish Adsense. I can't say it's a big surprise; google was on damage control in the last two years, but now seems to be DEFCON 1 or 2.

Hi, I am new.

I noticed that Adsense was no longer showing at my site, since yesterday when I use anything else than Google Chrome. If I try with FireFox, Opera and Safari (Windows), it's the backup ads showing.

Of-course, I am not using ad-blockers (backup ads wouldn't show if it was the case), and no other kind of add-ons which would block ads / privacy.

Under Chrome ads are showing fine.

I looked a the Firefox console, and I don't see any error message. Also, in the network status, I see the loading of all the adsense files js/html.

I tried with other sites (not mine), and it seems to be the same.

Anyone else have this problem ?

I forget to mention that I am not using the Ad balance, i left it at 100% fill rate.

Also, the coverage stats for yesterday (and today so far) is roughly at 100%

Hi Peter_S and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

Thank you keyplyr ! :)

Why is Adsense so bad this month? Worst RPM ever

Welcome, Peter_S!

So, Mentat, do you think moving to DFP may be a good alternative? I have nominally figured it out already, so will have to go back and re-read the threads pertaining to its setup. Since DFP is operated by Google, how would it be better than regular AS? Also, it is impossible for me to put backup ads on AdSense. There is no place to plug in someone else's code, and I'm not tech-savvy enough to do it any other way.

BTW, mid-morning and not ONE click, and AdSense is holding two top spots ATF, and I have only two AS ads on the pages.

If I am not mistaken, the point of DFP is to show ads outside of the AdSense eco system, specifically direct sales. So backup ads would essentially be the non-adsense units. Then you can set a price floor under which your backup(direct sales) ads are shown, over which, Adsense is shown.

If the goal is to show backup ads, then the ad-balancer seems like a simpler option.

The biggest difference is that DFP works a on set price, this is good if you are selling ads, because it easy to judge where to set the floor. However, if you are using backup ads (affiliate links or self promotion) setting that floor price is difficult because as the market changes and demand diminishes for high value ads you maybe showing backup ads far more often than is optimal, and a slight nudge down in the floor price would provide a big boost in earnings.

The ad balancer addresses this issue by limiting your ads to a percentage of demand. So it is to some extent self regulating. As we read here the ad balance isn't perfect either. Now you can adjust the floor price with DFP, so if you see a drop in demand then you can adjust but this requires careful monitoring. If you have small site, you may not generate enough traffic to get sufficient data to be able to make reliable decisions.

In my opinion ad-balancer works great for small sites with no direct ad sales, its simple easy to use, you can set it and forget and still get a pretty good outcome. But if you have direct ad sales and still have excess inventory then DFP is the way to go. It will be more work but I'm sure it can deliver solid results.

Lets not loose site of the fact that neither of these tools will help you if you have no demand for you inventory. And I think the keys to strong demand are traffic (high quality, bot free) and targeted content. With out theses your left with the bottom feeders of the online-ad world, paying as little as possible to steal your traffic.

Thanks NickMNS. I am using the ad balancer now. I'll see how that works out over the next month.

Ironside, How do you use Media. Do you give it 100% impressions or use it as backup with Adsense?

Also, how many ad spots would you go with if the average word count for an article is around 1200? Mobile ads tend to be positioned in line with each other.

There's definitely something wrong with Adsense since early february.

My other ads are all on the rise but adsense keep getting very down and very little up, and CTR makes absolutely no sense. From 1,7% one day to 0.45% the day after.... wtf.

April is on track to be the lowest-paying month I've had since I started using Adsense 3 or 4 years ago. My traffic and page reads are still good. I think a part of the problem is that Adsense still serves some crap ads to my sites, despite using Ad Balancer. But I think there's a larger issue at play here. I'm also starting to think this isn't something that's going to correct itself over time, the way downturns have in the past. JMHO

@nubchai I believe you're right. What we're seeing now is the new norm for AS. As far as I can see, it has no redeeming quality which would recommend keeping it on our sites.

Also, how many ad spots would you go with if the average word count for an article is around 1200? Mobile ads tend to be positioned in line with each other.

I use only one AdSense ad unit on a page, partly to avoid clutter but also because, whenever I've experimented with more than one unit, the revenue from the extra unit has been significantly less than for the first.

Full disclosure: AdSense is a secondary source of revenue on our information site (we earn considerably more revenue from affiliate links). If we relied entirely on AdSense, my attitude toward multiple ad units might be different.