Changed ad types to text only. Blocked download category. Revenue dropped by 45%.
Download button ads having 11% impression and 15% earning share.

Another rocking day on AdSense!

Diabolically pathetic here.!.!.!

WTF?!?!?!

My sites are littered with non-clickable crap ads from b a a a dot f u n

GOOGLE ... YOU'VE TOTALLY AND UTTERLY LOST THE PLOT

@RedBar
The fact that crappy ads appear on your site has very little to do with Google. Your business as a publisher is to sell the ad space to potential advertisers. This is generally done by building a site that will attract a high quality audience for which advertisers are willing to pay to have their ads seen. Crap ads are symptomatic of there being insufficient interest on the part of advertisers in terms of willing to advertise on your site.

No market == Low price == crappy advertisers.

If you want big brands to advertisers, you (not Google) are going to have to build a site that attracts the users that they are interested in, otherwise your going to die a slow death by a billion cuts...

In fact you should be thankful that Google allows those crappy ads to appear otherwise you wouldn't have any ads to show.

Redbar, I'm seeing the same idiotic baaa ad, it does not even seem to be clickable (I haven't tried but the cursor doesn't change to a pointer), on a site that normally has little problem getting advertisers because of the topic. This could very well be the worst period of the year because of vacations, but still, I feel like Adsense is behaving like some third rate ad platform.

I just checked my ad-review and I am seeing them too. They are showing up for hundreds of impressions, so they must be bidding a fair price. Or the market is really in a slump.

I just went through my full history in ad-review and I also found another similar set of ads for tup st er, almost identical ads from the same ad-words account leading to a different url. This is not the MO for spam ads, generally each ad has its own ad-words account and leads to unique domain. In this case I found four ads two leading to one domain two to another and all the ads shared the same account. These for units account for more than 1000 impression in the span of 24 hours. This is going hurt the bottom line.

I am seeing them, too. My sites rarely have trouble attracting quality advertisers, and I hardly ever block ads. These baaa ads and tupster ads have come out of nowhere.

Pathetic is a small word to describe my today (28th July)'s earning!

These advertisers did not run away for no reason from your site, crappy ads have always been there, but ask yourself why they have gone in the end of June? It is not about your site quality, since due to CPC fall, there have been better ratio of quality ads. It more seems that big G changed their algo and started to keep HQ ads just for their properties (they are doing it all the time, but now it is more visible)

@ember & @nickmns we're seeing the same, literally since last night they have appeared and they're getting a lot of impressions. Again we never have problems generally with spammy ads so they must be bidding a fair price or the market is at a low?!
We've so far had: tpstr.win, tpstr.party, baaa.site, baaa.fun, waaat.site, waaat.fun, funme.site, funme.fun
I've not actually clicked through on any to see what the end website is like - has anyone checked to see if it's legit?

My all ad blocks are filled with waaat.fun "have fun now" ad and it has an ugly face woman graphic.

Edit: Just saw tupster ad and it has a pic of goat with "have fun now" written beside the goat. Lol.

Seeing them since morning!

@MayankParmar @Maleda waaat.fun is redirected to tupster.com for me. It is against AdWords terms and conidered cloaking. What is interesting, whether these 0.01..0.05 clicks are from US or Canada. I know GDN very well and for last year, and I was never able to find traffic source for clients with CPC lower than 0.1USD. Is that CPC from mobile? If desktop, they must have insane CTR to reach such low prices

@maleda

tpstr dot win, tpstr dot party, baaa dot site, baaa dot fun, waaat dot site, waaat dot fun, funme dot site, funme dot fun

are the domains shown in the ad copy, but in the ad-review the linked domains are different I have seen two so far s o c k t . com and b e d t i m e .com. These domains appear to have little to do with the ads themselves.
Also, @redbar who first brought these ads to our attention said:

My sites are littered with non-clickable crap ads

This would suggest that he tried clicking them and was unable to. My guess (pure speculation) is that the spammers are buying ads on a CPC basis and then hacking the ad code so that they cannot be clicked. They then set a large budget and large bid, so that the ads appear in large number, we are talking millions of impressions, all for free.

@Redbar can you confirm that you click them and were not able to?

@NickMNS this is nonsense, since no CPC would allow to run ad copy with near-to-zero zero CTR. Moreover, what effect should it have if no one is able to visit their site - brand?

@blazinec

Moreover, what effect should it have if no one is able to visit their site - brand?

There are two main types of ad bids CPC and CPM, CPC is the standard cost per click, where the advertisers pays when an ad is clicked. CPM is cost per 1000 impression where the advertiser pays a rate based on the number of impressions. If you go to Performance Reports -> Advanced Reports -> Bid types -- you will get a report that shows how a many of each type of ads appeared on your site. CPM ads are generally used by advertisers that want to build brand awareness, eg: Coca-Cola wants people to see the brand but is unlikely to get users to buy there product online.

Now if you have seen the ads in question, the ad copy displays the a domain name in bold letters as the main text. But the actual domain associated with the ad is not the same as the ad copy. It his nothing or little to do with the ad.

So I am speculating that the spammers are using CPC bids to display CPM type ads. Again this is speculation and I have no way to prove this.

Note: that I assume that CPM bids are standardized to an RPM measure. That is for a CPC bid, Adsense estimates the revenue based on a 1000 impression by predicting a CTR for an ad say 1% and then taking the bid $1.00 per click and calculating the RPM = $10.00 (10 clicks per 1000 impressions * 1$). Then CPM bids are bid directly on a RPM measure so to win a bid the advertiser would need to bid $10.01 per 1000 impressions. So what I am speculating is that if the advertiser bids on CPC and could guarantee that there are no clicks then they could bid any amount per click and in the end up paying nothing. Adsense's algo would detect this after a short while, and adjust their bid down based on the poor CTR. But until that happened the ad appears for free. Rinse and repeat with a new account and new domain, and you could game the system for millions or billions of impressions before getting caught.

I have a few responsive units located under the heading that show as a 728 x 90 on the desktop and tablet and a small 300 x 2 50 rectangle on a mobile device. Just got a nice £2.71 click from one of these. I'm going to assume that this particular ad would not earn the same money in all countries? Also, I know £2.71 isn't a fortune, but do you think somebody is actually targeting my website with that particular ad? I wouldn't think that businesses would want to pay that kind of money on any old random website.

@NickMNS I know the system and totally agree... Even if Iike playing ad arbi games too, I did not realize their business model is based on cheating AdWords and using new domains on weekly basis. If their final landing page have some history and setted up AdSense channels, they can easily catch some higher CPC ads, and power it with free traffic before Ad rank is recalculated on AdWords side... Totally realistic, moreover if they can pass window.open as a hack into the ad, you can expect to have zero CPCs on AdWords and very positive roi - or, they are able eg.... To null own ad clicks as invalid traffic at the end of month :)

@NickMNS you have written about setting large spend - from my experience, when you set up unlimited click price and budget to 1USD (it was a mistake) we received few tens of clicks for 100USD in price - effective cost was 1.2USD as seen in invoice, for all of them.... So I think they can risk just few bucks per day, not unlimited budget, since campaign will run until budget is depleted, even if you setup low amount.... It is just about CPC.

@Redbar can you confirm that you click them and were not able to?

The same as koan, I passed my cursor over the ad and it did not change to a pointer so then I tried clicking all over the ad and nothing worked. I then reported it to Google in "Ad Choices" as "An ad I did not want to see" I think, refreshed the page and there it was again!

I then typed in a couple of their urls to see what was actually there, yuck, I suppose some people get taken in by this garbage.

So far today I've not seen them again and my advertisers seem to be back to "normal" however my summer traffic is so low earnings these past couple of weeks have been dire but, on the positive side, +17% on last year which was truly dreadful.

@RedBar and wasnt it on tablet or mobile? AdSense has created some filters last year, where they do not allow to click on ad first few seconds after page load, invalid activity protection ...

Like @Redbar I've also seen those unclickable ads, though only two or three times. They're more lo-res than the usual Adsense stock and simply can't be clicked. One was for findster-dot-co, I can't recall the others. I just assumed they were CPM ads or CPC ads that hadn't been correctly linked.

and wasnt it on tablet or mobile?

Also on PC, I wonder if Google saw them or read my complaint and immediately pulled them?

Ive now started getting those ads well. I noticed yesterday our clicks were 50% lower than usual.

These ads are all over the place. I sent a complaint to Adsense.

CTR has slumped lately so it makes you wonder if this is a factor. My CTR is currently running at 0.35% and I haven't seen a click registered for 2+ hours. Categorically the worst Adsense month I can remember.

Awful yesterday and continuing the trend today. Should've gone away for the month!

Today, My CPC dropped drastically and probably because of those "have fun now" ads.

However, I'm not seeing them anymore.

I am also seeing an usually low CTR as well, but the CPC is holding up. It must be that my bread and butter advertisers are still there but after that the market is thin.

@MayankParmar did you block the ads, or did they go away on their own?

I actually blocked the Ad Words accounts pumping those ads out, as there are too many of them. There were two Ad Words accounts that I found so far.

@BoxingFan how did you block AdWords accounts directly?