Not really accurate in my case, that or I'm severely under-performing. Clearly I'm in the wrong niches.

The most depressing part, and what I think is obvious to anyone in this business, the number one factor is traffic. To make money with AdSense you need traffic, and a lot of it.

In regards to niche selection, I started a second website a while back and expected that it would provide better RPM than my initial website because the audience was more targeted. That still hasn't panned out. One reason is competition is greater, so gaining traffic has been a real struggle. The other reason, as demonstrated by this widget, the returns in the niche are lower.

Also worth nothing that the returns are based on a fixed RPM, increasing the volume of traffic doesn't change the revenue per page view.

Simulations are ... simulations.

Prefer the Joe Friday method: "Just the facts, ma'am."

YMMV

.

According to their 'simulator', my main site could/should earn $500,000 a year from Adsense.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

So no, not accurate.

Hello-

The thing is, since the simulator is simply showing the average earning , based on the aggregation of all Adsense publishers by niche. So, if you are earning less, it means that most of sites in the same niche are doing "something" "better" than you.

it means that most of sites in the same niche are doing "something" "better" than you.

That is one way of looking at it, they are taking the mean. Or, they could be taking the earnings of the top performing sites, the top decile.

It is in AdSense's full advantage to encourage as many publishers as possible to use their service. Their interest is simply in showing ads anywhere, with no real regard to the website on which they appear (this obviously excludes spam sites). This dilutes the earning potential of the publishers, but ensures maximum revenue for Google. Giving new publishers the impression that AdSense will earn them more then can reasonably be expected is in AdSense's advantage. There is no disclosure on what the numbers are based on just "potential eanrings".

The simulation-generated figure in my publishing niche suggests an RPM of around $US10. That is laughable, given that users in this niche aren't in the buying cycle.

Simulators like this are a con. Rival ad networks have long been fond of using inflated earnings estimates to draw publishers into signing up. Now Adsense is also resorting to it, which is a sign of desperation. Contrast this to premium ad networks like Mediavine, Adthrive, etc. who don't make any kind of earnings or RPM estimate whatsoever.

I find the simulator a bit optimistic (especially about EU earnings, which seem rather overestimated), yet not very distant from my actual AdSense revenues.
What is difficult to interpret is in what niche a website is; some categories are simply too broad to provide a credible estimate for most websites; furthermore, regions are clearly too wide (Europe, Middle East, and Africa is an unreasonably over-generic area); I see great differences in RPM even for different western Europe countries; I can't imagine how, say, Germany and Gambia could be considered part of a single economic region.
Nevertheless, I expected the simulator to be much more unrealistic than it actually is.

Hmmm. The worst case description of my content category is almost accurate, however the best case content category would mean money wasn't something I'd have to think about...

Does make me think there is money still on the table, but I'm not going to compromise my UX to earn more and then tank.