Catastrophic fall in clicks and RPM over the past couple of days. CTR down under 0.5%. Ad inventory doesn't look any different than usual in Ad Review Centre. Hope it recovers or this month will be a total write off.

@trebuchet Do you have personalised ads switched off?

Personalised ads switched off at the beginning of the months. CPC has begun a death spiral. Revenues 40% down. If the aim of the EU with GDPR was to destroy 90% of the EU web businesses, they are succeeding in it, definitely...

Furthermore it looks as Google has reacted to the situation quite lazily. Their supposed "solution" to get consent from users in order to serve personalised ads is, at least, primitive. Trying now to create a custom code which actually works by myself.

added silktide cookie notice on my site and revenue plummeted immediately. coincidence? perhaps, but unlikely. the strange part is that europe comprises only a fraction of the total site revenue. guess the next move is to disable the notice and see what happens. what a mess.

added silktide cookie notice on my site and revenue plummeted immediately. coincidence? perhaps, but unlikely. the strange part is that europe comprises only a fraction of the total site revenue. guess the next move is to disable the notice and see what happens. what a mess.

Don't you display a cookie banner only to EEA visitors? Also, if you are not hosting yourself the javascript/css , this can slow down your page, and delay the displaying of ads, or people may have the time to scroll down on mobile devices. Things like that.

@puente Nah, silktide has nothing to do with the earnings.

thought sites were supposed to show the popup to all users in case a european is visiting miami, but who knows, the whole thing is one big clusterfudge.

want to believe silktide or cookie notices are not culpable but will disable that tonight and see what happens in the following days.

Today's actually bad. The CTR is dropping every month, and I dunno why.

Everything seems to have dropped today. It's beginning of the month and a new quarter. Maybe that's why. My traffic comes mainly from No America, so cookie notice/gdpr is not related imo

and a new quarter

Not really, it's more like the last month of a quarter.

Catastrophic fall in clicks and RPM over the past couple of days.

I have the same problem. May was better than May of a year ago. I thought (and hoped) it was the result of more optimization on my part. June started well and then plunged just a few days ago.

The one site that I own where the main audience is outside the EU is actually doing fine with RPM unchanged.

Everything else is completely broken - just no clicks.
The part of Adsense that does contextual targeting obviously just does not work anymore. The only reason I am still running Adsense Ads is that I'm waiting for someone from Adsense support to take a look. Spending my days trying to sell Ad space directly now.

@trebuchet Do you have personalised ads switched off?

I have, however the drop in clicks and earnings is global, not restricted to Europe.

CPC is actually very good at 20p, however with only 10 clicks so far it doesn't reflect that well with my earnings so far stop

June started well and then plunged just a few days ago.

Yep, same here.

Today's even more pathetic.

Damn, in the last few days CTR was incredibly low, but going down!

I hit an all time record yesterday— lowest earning ever. Heartbreaking .

Looks like today would be the lowest earning day in 2018.

*cries*

I don't want to seem apocalyptic, but there is something strange in what's happening. First the Brand protection, then the Better Ads thing (alll my websites are still not reviewed, after months), and now the GDPR and Google's unusually passive and weak approach to it (at least when small to medium publishers are involved). Maybe Google has lost its interest in Adsense on small websites - since its real focus is now on AD for search and display advertising on many-million-monthly-user websites - and this is simply a subltle strategy for getting rid of us?

Most of us here have sites making thousands of dollars a month. It's not a small amount. And apparently Google will not survive without us :D

AdSense has become unreliable, very unreliable. Today's a bad day, but it might rise tomorrow, and drop again. When CPC is high, traffic is high, the CTR would drop, and earnings will more or less remain same.

Google might be trying to recover the fine amount lol

June has been unbelievable for me. Very very high rpm ctr and cpc. I don't know what's happening. I think it is too good to be true. Even though my traffic went downhill my daily earnings are way up than they used to be this year.

June was good for me too, but it dropped again.

Most of us here have sites making thousands of dollars a month. It's not a small amount. And apparently Google will not survive without us :D

How much does Adsense represent of Alphabet's Revenue ? I mean Adsense for web publishers, not, ads showing at Alphabet's sites or special deals with big publishers... And how much it costs to run Adsense ? If Google was closing Adsense and just keep ads for itself, and big publisher this won't be noticeable in their revenues.

Also, I doubt that advertisers would mind. They prefer to be displayed on big sites, or at Facebook, than on random unknown small sites which look all the same anyhow.

Now, who knows, media.net might acquire adsense, they've been acquired themselves for 1 billion, so the chinese businessman behind has plenty of money.

I don't want to seem apocalyptic, but there is something strange in what's happening. First the Brand protection, then the Better Ads thing (alll my websites are still not reviewed, after months), and now the GDPR and Google's unusually passive and weak approach to it (at least when small to medium publishers are involved). Maybe Google has lost its interest in Adsense on small websites - since its real focus is now on AD for search and display advertising on many-million-monthly-user websites - and this is simply a subltle strategy for getting rid of us?

You could be right. I will say this much: Most of my YouTube channels were demonetised with the recent 1000 subscriber requirement, but the one channel that is still monetised is now making double what it was making before with the same views.
If Alphabet were to get rid of all of the small publishers, they would force up the advertising prices for the remaining ad space.

@QuaterPan my bad. You're right. July 1st starts the next quarter.

@QuaterPan my bad. You're right. July 1st starts the next quarter.

No hard feeling , but for a second I thought I had forgotten to submit my quarterly accountancy :)

by the way, disabling personalized ads globally, still doesn't work for me. as well as the ad balance.

I've had to go back to Link Units - even though I hate them. At least some people click on them, and I simply couldn't continue with 50 times less income.
I have removed all other Ad units, as they are just a waste of time when the targeting is broken.

I noticed that some link units are displaying a combination of two local place-names, both of which are spelled incorrectly in the same link!
Google's genius "AI" must have lifted them from some forum.

Google's genius "AI"

May be it's adapting to the level of Internet user and speaking ( writing ) like them :)

By the way, about AI - [webmasterworld.com...]

May be it's adapting to the level of Internet user and speaking ( writing ) like them

I fear that you are correct.