@Cralamarre
Do not refresh your stats. I made this mistake earlier today.

Actually, my earnings today have already surpassed yesterday's with 11 hours still to go, although yesterday was a holiday in the US. But still, my RPM is back to what it was before Christmas, which is very good.

The only good thing I see is the time of ads appearance. Today it takes 10 mins after the ads blank page load.

AdSense is still going strong today. Highest earnings so far this month, with 9 hours still left to go.

My earnings are still suffering. I thought by now my coverage would be increasing but it seems stagnant. It feels if a URL may need not just 1 or 2 visits but a couple in order to be crawled. And then who knows how long that crawl cache is kept before it has to come back again, probably leaving the URL with blank ads again.

The only solution that I can see to this problem is to just replace all AdSense ads with something else. Other ads that I have on my site are greatly outperforming AdSense.

My earnings, RPM and coverage are all improving but definitely not back to normal.

@nubchai - Mine were improving greatly until yesterday, then the bottom fell out again. It's a real roller coaster ride, and I still don't understand it. I disabled ad balance tonight. It was set at 72 for 100% coverage. Hardly any ads were showing up at all.

@azlinda
What other ads do you have ?

@sdksjdksjd I have Media.Net, Fuze360 and Spoutable. I have only one AdSense ad left, and that isn't showing up most of the time.

I'm pretty sure many publishers would have ditched AdSense after this stupidity.

I have checked my old posts that I published in 2011 and 2012. Some of them barely get a pageview in a month. Still Adsense ads were appearing on them.

I replaced a link unit that was between my horizontal menu and the title with a 320 mobile ads. Haven't had a single click on it. Yesterday was dismal, today isn't looking any better. To rub salt in the wounds I received an email from YouTube last night informing me that one of my channels will no longer be eligible for AdSense. Apparently the channel has got to have over 1000 subscribers now and 30 hours of view time, not quite sure what that means. So they just told me that unless things change I will no longer be making money off my ads from February. Doesn't Google own YouTube? Say no more. Up yours Google

Yesterday my AdSense earnings were up 70% from the week before and everything was back to normal. I don't know why, but we'll see what happens today.

Yeah, Google is really rocking the boat this season. I have two YT channels that meet the views and watch time requirements, but fall short on subscribers.
I get a few bucks from them added to my payout each month, which is nice. That is all going away, with this subscriber thing.

One of them has been paying since 2011, and the other since 2014.
So, except I magically come up with 1k subs in two weeks or so, it's eff you to me, from the big G.

Perfect timing, as my Adsense is currently performing at <50% output.

I remember last year when YouTube changed their policy so that only channels with at least 10,000 views would qualify for ads. It was right after I started up my channel, so I had to spend the first few months making videos with no earnings, just trying to get to that 10,000 views mark. From what people are saying today, it sounds like they've gotten even more strict about who can qualify for ads. However, no offence to anyone here, but YouTube is full of garbage that no advertiser would want to be associated with, so they need to do something to keep advertisers safe. And let's face it, if your channel doesn't meet a minimum requirement of 30 hours of view time, you weren't making much money to begin with. Watch time and audience retention rate are everything with YouTube. Subscriber numbers and the number of views are meaningless.

Really poor performance so far today

Wow, 1000 YT subscribers. That hurts. Im not aware of this.

You can always post a viral-worthy videos for subs and views, just like how that Logan did. This is what Google wants :D

December on YT was great, but income really took a plunge in January. Much worse than website.

Posted a new article on my site just now, and this time the ads appeared instantly, no delay. Maybe they're fixing the issue.

I think Google are mocking me now, they just send me an email asking how well I did in December.

Got the same email, suggesting me to use Page-level ads lol.

Just as Google has been doing with search, it sounds as though Google/YouTube is catering to the very big players.

@azlinda YouTube isn't catering to the big players, they're just trying to limit the chances of ads appearing in low-quality videos, which upsets advertisers and hurts earnings for everyone. The only alternative to limiting ads to channels with a proven track record would be to screen every new video that's uploaded, and that's just not possible.

The recently announced changes in the YouTube partnership program (view and subscriber requirements raised) and the changes in AdSense performance for some folks since mid-Dec might have some common features:

- At both, Google points to the protection of advertisers' interest. "Brands" are mentioned, but I'd assume it just means that advertisers in general are supposed to expect their ads appear on/over quality content.

- For YT, Google chose metrics to play a role in quality analysis: numbers of views/subscribers are now required to remain in their partner program.

- For AdSense, they let the job done by the Mediapartners robot. I suspect that not all sites are subject to this quality test, though - there might be a "whitelist" of sites that are not affected. "Whitelisted" sites might have got into the list either by a list of signals and/or manually.

So, Google says it's all due to protect advertisers. However, there might be more to it.

Like for YT, it might also be the time for Google to get rid of publishers with low quality / less lucrative sites. Either by booting them like at YT or making them leave on their own with stopping to display AdWords ads.

Either by booting them like at YT or making them leave on their own with stopping to display AdWords ads.

Google always has favored advertisers over publishers. They could care less about their publisher network. Their templated email response to publishers is such a broad response to publishers that have lost 50% of their revenue out of the blue. I don't think this went down like they thought it would. Seems very poor planned. They point to their two paragraph document about the Adsense crawler and some details making it easier for them to crawl urls.

They should have crawled URLs for at least a year beforehand and not just flip a switch one day before the holidays. I'm sure Google took a hit with this update as well obviously but pennies to them. Also, their advertisers are gonna be bidding very high these days for the limited ad space that they have to compete for in the auction. At least YT publishers got a warning, regular Adsense publishers got nothing.

"advertisers in general are supposed to expect their ads appear on/over quality content"
Definitely not.
- if ad is placed, based on visitor interests, then advertiser shouldn't care about the content. Suppose you're advertising fashion stuff. Would you care, if your ad will be placed into poor travel content, based on the visitor interests? No. Why?
- if the ad is placed, based on the contextual, then poor content is even better to advertiser, since more chances that visitor will focus attention on the banner.
Not to mention, that "quality" by itself is very subjective.

New policy is about sensitive content. This is reasonable. Google just poorly handled implementation.

Google always has favored advertisers over publishers.

Obviously, advertisers are the client, they pay the bills. Publishers are suppliers and the pool is huge, there are likely tens of thousands of new publishers signing up every day and another tens of thousands dropping out. Publishers are a cheap commodity. The only way make your site worth caring about is to differentiate yourself by providing high quality, high volume traffic that converts, and that is almost impossible for an independent publisher on today's web which is dominated by big players. These are the dynamics of the market we do business in you need to accept it. It ain't gonna change any time soon!

They should have crawled URLs for at least a year beforehand and not just flip a switch...

They have always crawled your site. Nothing about the crawling has changed. The only change is rather minor technically (with a massive impact). Previously if AdWords received a request for a page that was not in the index, they bid on the impressions regardless. Now AdWords has changed this policy and does not participate in the auction if it does not have record of the page in the index, increasing the probability that the ad slot will not be filled.

I will totally agree that the roll-out of this policy change was total garbage. They should have informed publishers in advance such that we could takes steps to mitigate impacts of the change. Now we are all left scrambling a:) wondering if in fact this is the cause of the drop, and b:) what to do solve the issue. all while we loose revenue.

Subscriber numbers and the number of views are meaningless.

Well, YouTube doesn't think so. The new policy has both a subscriber and views threshold to be eligible for monetization.

You can always post a viral-worthy videos for subs and views, just like how that Logan did. This is what Google wants :D

These types of videos are what trigger policies like this in the first place.

The only alternative to limiting ads to channels with a proven track record would be to screen every new video that's uploaded, and that's just not possible.

The new changes include manual review of all videos uploaded by publishers in the Google Preferred tier.
So, it maybe impossible to manually review videos by everyone for now, but it can't be ruled out of the future either.