Have you moved to https? Some browsers are making things ugly for users these days.

Yes I have actually! Anything I can do to fix this?

Cross the t's, dot the i's, and re-evaluate your expectations. Things have changed. :(

Are there any places with higher general RPM than adsense? Despite the 50% cut, it's still higher than many others I have tried.

Should I switch back to HTTP?

Should I switch back to HTTP?

As that fellow back in another war, faced with over-whelming odds, with no hope of succor:

Nuts!

Once you move to HTTPS STAY THERE. There's no benefit in going BACKWARDS.

/rant off ... this myth of lost value for doing what is the Next Step sometimes makes me cranky. Sorry!

haha sounds good. What about other programs? Do any compare with adsense?

I realized that I didn't have an ads.txt file so I added that and switched my banners back to the same that I was using the last few years (I went to responsive this year). Today will be the first full day with all the changes but I did it early enough yesterday to see some results. Some.

My RPM is slowly creeping up, but has nearly $0.50 to reach the low end of what I've had the last many years. Looking back at a report from last year, my average active area viewable was around 45-50% (not sure if that's good or bad). PV and Imp were 79k/234k. Last 7 days, my viewable got up to 50-55% but wow my PV and Imp were 28k/97k. Damn.

I do know my serps took a hit for some reason that I can't figure out. I've ALWAYS ranked top 5 for a specific keyword that I'm now ranking top 15 in. I've pretty much dropped across the board a few slots in every major keyword I really have which is mind-blowing considering I've figured the longer I've had the site, the easier it would rank.

My only guess with serps is that seeing as this is a seasonal blog, I may have had it on the shelf for too long this winter and it's just taking longer than usual for google to bump it back up after I've dusted it off. Maybe one morning I'll wake up and notice a nice bump in ratings back to where I am used to.

Kind of a ramble post with very little actual substance. It's clear after this that RPM is an issue but my traffic numbers have to dramatically increase somehow. I may have to spam my social media more throughout the day because of the changes FB has made in showing pages less and less. With 40k+ followers, I am lucky if 2k actually see it when I post links to my site.

I do know my serps took a hit for some reason that I can't figure out. I've ALWAYS ranked top 5 for a specific keyword that I'm now ranking top 15 in.

We've been warned - it was announced months ago: [webmasterworld.com...] Google has decided to scramble the index to favor mobile now. How your site performs for mobile users is determining where things rank today. I know, right? I received the email telling me about the mobile first index inclusion. _{Thanks a lot.}

It does not matter that 88% of your visitors are on desktop. One niche site I started in 2010 has ranked top 3 since the first 3 months. It is mobile friendly, but not "mobile first" which has sent it to #14 in the great new index. I'm not scrambling to remove content or add on AMP pages. The low number of mobile visitors tells me to leave it alone. Of course the mobile visitors aren't likely to increase any time soon. Oh well. It was nice.

Mobile first? So that is that amp thing I'm starting to see? Will I notice an improvement if I do mobile first? Around 80% of my traffic is mobile/tablet, so it wouldn't hurt me too much to have a very friendly mobile site

You can look into AMP, Google's AMP Project [ampproject.org] site can tell you what's involved. For anyone with a lot of mobile visitors it may be the way to go.

There are some limitations, and it is not just another version of your pages. Though for platforms such as WordPress there are tools to simplify integration. I would caution some research around here because several members say it's not the answer to everything. Try that site search in the upper right corner of the pages here, it may help.