That's a drastic drop during 2014.

Did your site suffer any technical/SEO issues during 2014, which haven't been addressed?

Or, perhaps, was the site's existing technical/SEO structure (leading up to to 2014) assessed by Google, in 2014, to not meet best practices for SERPs and the site was demoted?


Anyway, congratulations on earning an average of 44k a year from Adsense.

This figure / years look very familiar (divided by 100 in my case, but still, the same trend).

@ClosedForLunch - No issues then, that I was aware of. Some issues 2 years later (SSL implementation, redirection, etc.)
There are many theories.

One is, some Google employees got miffed that some AdSense users were making a LOT more money than they were, and took action.
Other high earners met their demise, as well, which has been well documented - I won't name names.
This is the best theory I have to date. "You were being too successful at it, we had to slap you down."

@Selen - Thanks for mini confirmation #1.
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@Sally Stitts

Reference points such as tech issues / visitor stats / SERP position on a year by year basis for your site may hint at the reason for the rapid revenue drop, if the reason isn't the Adsense product itself going through big changes in 2014.

"... if the reason isn't the Adsense product itself going through big changes in 2014."

Just what I am looking for. How much was me, how much was them?
Always wondering if it was my big mouth that got me some negative attention from them, and precipitated demotion (SERPS, ad quality, flipping of the "here's-a-clown" or "here's-a-jerk" or "not-what-we-want" algorythm bit, etc).

And, if indeed, such bits do actually exist, and how many of them there might be.
Just paranoia on my part, or practicality on their part? Still wondering.
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I don't have as much history due to an account switch in 2014, but taking the best year (2018) as the baseline it looks something like this:

2015: 28%
2016: 66%
2017: 93%
2018: 100%

[edited by: robzilla at 8:53 pm (utc) on Jan 22, 2019]

Bust my theory, will ya?
2015 Posts, to coincide with the content of this post? It will work 3 more times. Tee-hee.
Still, this is exactly what I am looking for.

As for the above post - SO, IT WAS ME, who doomed myself. Somehow. Rats.

an aside - spellchecking here is very ambitious, and sometimes irritating, algo becomes also, tee-hee becomes a term for a little (word's) part, etc.
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Can't speak for you guys, but in situations like this I like to reflect on what someone once said about Steve Austin.

"We can rebuild him. We have the technology. We can make him better than he was. Better... stronger... faster."

Sally Stitts, your website is Steve Austin.

Ha!.!.!.!

Similar'ish to SS other than my peak was earlier in 2010-2012 at up to $250K p.a.

Last year, 2018, was $1,100.00 ...yes, read that again, USD 1,100.00.

I've watched my traffic decrease through various crap algos. The biggest one was when G took a total dislike to a fabulous trade focused Coppermine gallery I had. Overnight G destroyed 100K visitors a day, I have no freakin' idea why! All the images were original and exclusive yet Google simply stopped sending traffic for those searches.

I have other sites with similar issues, they have ranked extremely well for years and then, all of a sudden, bam, gone.

Why? There is absolutely nothing wrong with these sites yet the algorithm, or someone with an agenda, is screwing-over perfectly legitimate sites.

The current algorithm is being deliberately manipulated ... if you do not believe that then check the G.com SERPs and see how many first page results are hosted in the USA and have a .com

Please, do not try and pacify me with simple, small count results!

Think about this, the world's BIGGEST market is Asia, NO .asia sites rank in G.com ... HUH?

Over time, there are types of web sites that Google decide to like and dislike, and this can change every other year. I have some UGC sites (but moderated) that Google Search stopped liking a few years ago (maybe 2015) and started to downright dislike in the past year (2018), and Google Adsense stopped showing ads unless a page has a minimum of traffic. These site's Adsense revenue imploded from lower traffic and lack of Adsense coverage and they're essentially on life support right now. I have one site left that is keeping me afloat, no UGC, just well researched long articles being patiently added over the years. So from my experience, unless you're a big brand, the quality of each pages must be high or else the lower quality ones (which is natural if you have UGC) will penalize the whole web site, unless you're backed by a corporation with the money, the links, the marketing, etc. I was always a Google fan but nowadays I long for the days when there were 3-4 search engines competing.

Same story here. From making $25,000 per month during my peak years, down to $500 per month. It's painful; still is.

Last year I got invited to an Adsense study with an hour long phone call with Adsense people -- and I had to tell them I stopped caring about Adsense that I didn't even know most of the new features they are talking about. I don't even log in to Adsense anymore. It's just there on the site

My sites are all business-related. Got hit, not by algorithm, but when Google disliked me putting my backend's login page to password protect when I got hammered with DDOS. After the server error messages on webmaster tools, traffic declined by 50%. Never recovered. Oh well

My best year was 2015; it's gone downhill since then. But to be fair, so have I (health-wise) and also around then I started focusing more on attracting direct advertisers and giving more space to other programs, like Media.net. Nevertheless, the AdSense decline was real. I'm not terribly surprised. I like the text ads, and G is really kind of encouraging other formats on the advertising side.

Remember 2014 was the year (it carried over into 2015) of big advertiser outrage aka they finally realised how blatantly they they were being scammed.
The prior official IAB definition:
Impression’ is a measurement of responses from a Web server to a page request from the user browser
aka a site made an ad server call, and got billed.

The subsequent (paraphrased) definition:
a viewable ad impression is one where 50% of an ad is visible for at least 1-second.
aka ads had to be actually sort of potentially seen to be billed.

Suddenly a lot of CPM ads, i.e. at bottom of long form content, were no longer producing revenue.

2. as with others in this thread I have long been moving away from AdSense to direct ad space sales. In 2004/5 AdSense was on 99% of English language pages and producing 90% of revenue. Today it's on 8% of pages and producing 3% of revenue.

Because of the change (noticeable from 2007) in (declining) number of pages with AdSense I switched from comparing total AdSense revenue YoY to comparing average (total revenue / number ad blocks) revenue per ad block by type (click or CPM) and so not really helpful to share.
I will say that as soon as I read the news that Julie Fleischer of Kraft said they had rejected 75-85% of CPM ad billings due to fraud concerns I immediately removed all CPM ads. And used the controversy to help sell direct ad space sales pitches.

Traffic source diversification is the elephant in the room: as everyone and their neighbour built sites the Google search traffic pie, while growing steadily, was being sliced into ever more potential slices; this competition combined with Google's increasing answer/stay-with-G efforts have compounded the AdSense drop seen by many. It's a nasty one two punch series that has stunned quite a few Google-centric (relying mostly/all on AdSense and Google organic) sites.

My very best AdSense revenue year was 2009. But the drop since is my dropping ad blocks to make more directly.

Most of this should be no surprise. g had to build a business from nothing. The way to do that was to make a few rich to get more to join the game ... at some point the mine was fully salted and every body wanted to play ... and g then weaned the players from the big bucks they had been "giving away to get the game started" and, as the middle man, took larger percentages as the middle man from all the players.

Happens all the time. Look how rail, telephones, M$, etc. got started and the monopolies those created before getting slapped down. I suspect g is next on the list, but what you see right now is probably as good as it is going to be in the future... if not worse.

Not saying this a wrong, just a matter of bean counting and greed, which are pretty ordinary human activities.

Meanwhile, with no contracts for doing business, ie a unilateral set of guidelines from one party against the other (not for), if one chooses to play, one should not have great expectations of "fair play".

My few clients still relying on adsense have, the last three years, been pretty flat with gains and loses in the 1-3% range year on year. Usually just enough to cover all web operating expenses and maybe one night a month out at Micky D's.

In recent months mine have improved. However - as always - this is not a function of AdSense but Google Search.

I have steady traffic from years of folks bookmarking the sites and link referrals from other sites. It's predominantly Google Search results which are the primary variable.