@red bar does your AdSense earning show in US dollars, or did you convert for the benefit of the people on here?

WooHoo ... Just had a $3.60 mobile click

Sad really. I remember the days (i.e. 2014) when you could get 20 or 30 of those a day. Now it's all penny clicks. Welcome to the new paradigm.

August is good for me because my views from the USA has doubled but now it is back to normal. The CTR looks dull since the beginning.

Has the CTR dropped for anyone else in August?

Ironside, I don't really agree with your statement:

Unless we actually know your estimated and finalised earnings then telling us your clawback percentage is really meaningless.

To me, percentage is more relevant than absolute amounts. Because if someone made $10 and had 80% deduction vs. someone who made $1000 and had 10% deduction...the latter has indeed lost more absolute money, but the former is more concerning as most of their traffic/earnings was gone by the end of the month. With everyone stating their %, it actually lends to a better comparison rather than people just spitting out random numbers.

I had well into three digit clawback in July, stating that on its own means nothing imo.

My deduction was only two digit (euros) but that was enough to reduce my first ever five digit month to a four digit month...

does your AdSense earning show in US dollars, or did you convert for the benefit of the people on here?

I earn in Sterling however most people can relate to Dollars and their currency therefore it makes it simpler.

Has the CTR dropped for anyone else in August?

My UK has collapsed whereas last month it was the USA plus, ok I know it's only two days so far, mobile has delivered just over 68% of earnings!

@Childplease yeah, I can see your point. However, if you said to me you are getting a three digit clawback then that either means you are earning into five digits with a low percentage of clawback, or three digits with a massive clawback.

@David19922 clawback is difference between the estimate earnings for the month and the actual amount paid to you. In general you are paid out less than was estimated. Just to be clear, estimated earnings are the earnings reported in the performance report, and what is paid out is the value that appears in top right corner of the Adsense dashboard "Balance".

The exact reconciliation between estimated earnings and final balance is provided in the payments report (Settings -> Payments -> View Transactions)

Google have the ability to detect invalid clicks and activity during the month and when they actually happen. I don't know how many people are earning money from AdSense, but it must be into the millions. Imagine if Google was taking 3 or £4 off each person every month, that's a few million quid extra for them.

Certain invalid activities are detected and reduced in almost real time.

The easiest way to tell is that your personal impressions are generally removed. And high value clicks get real time adjusted. This is real observation though looking at stats every minute through the hours. Another common adjusts is if the clicks were happening in fast succession (slow internet perhaps), Google detect those short time spans and reduced the additional duplicate clicks as necessary.

Perhaps the real time algorithm filter out all the obvious invalid things like bots, impressions from certain IP / cookie ranges, duplicate clicks. And monthly deductions look like invalid activities through statistical model that require additional processing, such as poor conversion rate, intentional clicks, visitor click pattern behavior etc.

In my opinion, clawback percentage becomes meaningful only after certain earning milestone. After that milestone, all accounts look more or less the same. Say $1000 / month. If a publisher is only earning like $50 a month, if a few high value clicks get redacted, that'll be a 50% clawback! Or if $1 a month, and that get reduced to 1 penny, that'll be a 99% clawback!

Mobile is the future. And many people are experiencing it first hand. Certain niches can still live and thrive with the desktop users, I am not arguing against that, but that number is decreasing. I have a few sites that take full advantage of the better paying desktop users, but even with that, the visitor profile is shifting towards mobile.

As more advertisers (and agencies behind them) embrace mobile optimized bids and sites, the full shift will come hard and fast. I'd rather be prepared than get hit hard.

August RPM is looking to be much higher than that of July's through the first 3 days.

August start is better than July. CTR is down. It will be hopefully back in few days and overall, it would be better than July.

Going to try DFP's First Look.

I don't know how many people are earning money from AdSense, but it must be into the millions.

According to Google's AdSense log-in page:

A few reasons why almost 2 million people have chosen AdSense

[google.com...]

2 million?! Great.

Most of us use AdSense because there are no good alternatives. Media.net is good but it shows its true colour after a week.

And as Google has launched built-in ad-blocker in Chrome Canary on PC and Android, AdSense might perform lil better next year.

Imagine if Google was taking 3 or £4 off each person every month, that's a few million quid extra for them.

Google doesn't take that money, in fact Google doesn't pay you because they are not being paid. So for every £4 that you don't earn Google doesn't earn £1 (roughly). Based on your reasoning Google is forgoing millions in earnings every month.

Take note that in the top left of the Adsense dashboard it clearly and boldly states "Estimated Earnings", "Estimated" means that the figure is subject to change. In the right corner is states "Balance" and I have always received exactly to the penny, what I have been owed and exactly on time every month.

There is a lot of things that Adsense can be faulted for but fraudulently skimming from its publishers in certainly not one of them.

I invite you to try out one of the many other shady ad-exchanges, and see what it is really like to get fleeced.

Strange figures today.
Low ad request, normal click number => 20% bigger CTR, but low revenue.

I've noticed since changing from 3 "normal" ad units to 1 normal ad low down on the page and 2 link units per page - that my clawback is a lot higher. I would've thought seeing link units are double click ads that invalid clicks would be lower...

Ironside, why can't I have a four-digit earning? :P

I just think if someone here says I had a $20 clawback, it provides no context. Did that person have estimated $10,000 and takes home $9980? Or was his estimated earnings $30 and now he gets $10?

I always figured the claw back % at least lets people compare how much they are getting clawed back relative to other sites. If my three-digit clawback is 10% and others are at 2-3%, I can sort of deduce that I likely have a higher proportion of invalid activity that is caught end-of-month.

The world of Google AdSense is so secretive that nobody really knows anything about each other. Some people may find these figures interesting, but they are just figures at the end of the day and are not going to help anyone improve their earnings.

What does interest me is what kind of hosting people are using. If you're on earning a four digit amount from Google AdSense every month than I would imagine your hosting is going to be extremely expensive. After all, you're going to need several million visitors if you are on that kind of money. I wouldn't have thought anything less than a dedicated server can handle that amount of traffic, and we know how expensive they can be.

What does interest me is what kind of hosting people are using. If you're on earning a four digit amount from Google AdSense every month than I would imagine your hosting is going to be extremely expensive. After all, you're going to need several million visitors if you are on that kind of money. I wouldn't have thought anything less than a dedicated server can handle that amount of traffic, and we know how expensive they can be.

It all depends on how efficient the scripts and database that you are using are. If you've coded a system for yourself, then you can easily serve that many users with a modest setup. If you're using Wordpress, then you'll need something more powerful.

My sites were very busy a few years ago, and they were very fast even on shared hosting.
The code is lean and a lot of thought went into the design of the database tables.

It's all about proper cache without having too many database call / page queries. Any sites can pull it off as long as it does not have that many moving dynamic parts. (But if does, that amount of traffic can kill sites without cache).

July is my best month of the year so far but August seems not good.

I've noticed a slight improvement in RPM and ad quality yesterday and today. Earnings still not back to acceptable levels but at least they're headed in that direction.

Had a bad day yesterday (4th August). Everything was down.

Today, CPC is high, RPM too but bad CTR and the earning too.

Ironside, I think you're overestimating the hosting needs of high traffic/high revenue sites but ultimately it does depend on what sort of site it is and what sort of content is on it.

My one site generates five digits per month from AdSense alone and my hosting costs me not even close to $500/month and it's not a full-on dedicated server either.

Just tried out their new in-article ads. Then quickly proceeded to remove them.

[imgur.com...]

How come 'Start Download' button in native ads? Pathetic.

@Ironside I don't agree. I made lower four figures (over 2K) last month from 70K visits. With my other sites I reached five figures month once with about 300K visits. You don't need millions of visits if you have solid optimization of ad placement and user engagement on your site. But of course, it depends on niche and traffic sources. However, I would not work with niche that needs millions of visitors to earn four figures.

My host is siteground cloud hosting for about $130 monthly. It could be even cheaper, as I host more sites on that same hosting. Their support is phenomenal.

What does interest me is what kind of hosting people are using. If you're on earning a four digit amount from Google AdSense every month than I would imagine your hosting is going to be extremely expensive. After all, you're going to need several million visitors if you are on that kind of money. I wouldn't have thought anything less than a dedicated server can handle that amount of traffic, and we know how expensive they can be.

My hosting costs me around $300 a year (plus that add on CloudFlare stuff I bought) and there's probably 90 sites total on my plan (some are mine, some are my dev's, and some are client sites) Almost all the sites are WordPress and about a dozen of them get mad crazy traffic (it's not unusual to have 6000 to 8000 people pounding on each site during peak times, and serve up a million pageviews per site per day for short periods of time). The rest of them don't get near that much traffic. But my host and I have worked out a yearly ritual where about a month before peak time, they stress test my two or three busiest sites, and let me know if I've done anything that's going to affect the performance (like install a poorly coded plugin or some such) And some years they've had to move one or two sites to different servers to load balance them, but I keep waiting for them to tell me I gotta move to a dedicated server, and so far it hasn't happened. YMMV.

I made lower four figures (over 2K) last month from 70K visits. With my other sites I reached five figures month once with about 300K visits.

Is it possible?
I had 300k+ visits last month and made half thousand.
Can you give some tips?
My niche is legal and full traffic from India.

@capulkit I doubt it's possible with Indian traffic. You would need US visitors to be able to get to these numbers.