Today is pretty bad. Down 30% on last month.

Things are steadily improving for us as January continues.

Traffic is fine, CPC and RPM way down compared previous years. Even the US is falling behind.

I think that too many sites are showing too many ads, leadung to more and more people getting kind of ad blind. So many sites are looking just plain spammy.

Adsense is low as usual, but Ad Manager is a mess yesterday and today.
50% the minimum usual figures.
Is like a big holiday in US.

Is the Chinese New Year, so the internet is taking a break :)

Man, this bad, Adsense is heading for a new low.
To quote above, soon I'll have to pay in order to use NON-sense!

Lowest day ever since 2005
This is confirmation that Adsense is finished
Or crazy

Having my best January in years.

I'm having a great January. I'm sorry I wasted part of it using Ezoic!

azlinda, what? I thought you said Ezoic was working really well for you? I was almost thinking of trying them again.

Does anyone think removing some ads on a page could improve cpc?

Some years ago I noticed that showing 1 ad instead of 2-3 increased CPC considerably, not sure if that is still the case, now I always try to run just one.

Ember, Azlinda+,

My revenue is on the opposite direction. Lowest I’ve seen since 2005 even with almost same traffic. Are you using features like Ad Balance or Auto Ads?

rcodabas, I tried Ad Balancer once and lost money. I tried auto ads on a WP site but could not get them to show. I just started trying them on a hand coded site and the RPM is about 50% of the normal ads. I will say, though, that the vignette ads work very well.

@ember, Ezoic did very well the first couple weeks I used it, and then it dwindled down each passing day. I was really hooked at the beginning. Alas!

$@rcodabas, I'm using both Ad Blance and Auto Ads. I've had no problems with either.

Googles Adsense revenue is increasing yet our CPC is decreasing. Why? The reason is simple math. Each day more and more new websites are running AdSense ads. However, the number of new advertisers is not keeping pace. Demand is decreasing relative to the number of new websites. That equals lower CPC and revenue for us.

[edited by: gatormark at 2:08 am (utc) on Jan 29, 2020]

gatormark, yep.

Pathetic month. High traffic from tier one countries, but low CPC, CTR and RPM.

Something is definitively wrong

It's almost laughable how poor AdSense performs on content sites these days. No surprise how little activity these threads are receiving.

My theory is that the bulk of revenue in 2020 is being generated through Youtube that surely has to be the key focus moving forward.

More and more people go to video rather than content sites where one has to actually READ and COMPREHEND.

The world is getting dumber and dumber by the day. I've made my living as a writer/publisher for going on 40 years and my initial success on the web - from 1999-2015 - seems to be slowly slipping away as more people gravitate to video.

There are many other aspects to what's happening, but if G is experimenting with AI (which I believe is a crock of bunk), it's going to cost many of us money. Already has for me. January was up, down, but mostly down. Worst month since last January. Glad it's almost over.

Just a note: I accidentally removed google from my ads/text file. Clicks dropped to ZERO, and when I restored, it took two days to get back in gear, and I had my best day of the month... followed by an OK day, then the worst day of the month, another OK day, and then another low for the month. I'm just wondering if removing G from ads.txt and then restoring it had anything to do with that one big day.

G and Amazon seem to be cooking up an unannounced partnership. Between the two of them, they are dominating traffic and revenue, pulling both away from smaller sites. Getting to a point at which it's difficult to compete with not just one, but now two behemoths working together. Feds are reportedly stepping up anti-trust inquiries. Can't happen soon enough.

The world is not getting less intelligent by the day. Consumer trends change and those who don't keep up get left behind.

If people want video, why aren't you creating video content?

If you still wrote for just paper newspapers in 2019, you'd be screwed, right? In the same way, if you only count on text content, you'll be screwed. There is a harmony between both.

Low CPC....

Youtube is just as crowded as the web. Every topic - just like the web.

I have a number of sites that are each highly themed. Before the recent changes in Google, the Adsense ads were generally matching the theme of the sites.

Now I'm seeing large numbers of non-specifically themed ads like Victoria Secret's ads and Urban Outfitters and Oil Change banners. These ads have nothing to do with anything I previously looked at online and these ads have nothing to do with the theme of my sites.

My CPC rate and revenue has plummeted and now that I'm looking more closely at the ads being displayed, I can see why. Is anyone else noticing a significant change in the targeting of the Adsense ads being displayed on their sites?

All my metrics, except trafic volume, are showing a 20% decline year to year. Ads are indeed irrelevant in many cases. Example just now on my index page: 'how to sell your car' ad, while my sites areI in the elementary education niche. Hope Feb will be better.

Irrelevant ad? Oh, yeah. I checked one of my pages (and another from one of my competitors), and Adsense is currently running ads for earwax removal. Couldn't be farther from the topic.

I can see why people aren't clicking too much, right now, but it's getting a bit ridiculous. Yesterday was another low. Ah, well.

Edit: And while I'm sure YouTube has a lot to do with the current shape of the web, it wasn't too long ago that I was performing pretty well. This time last year was pretty rocking, in fact.

This is called not Brexit but Adsexit

I also see ads for earwax removal, crepey skin issues, donald trump mortgage changes and basically the types of low quality 'who on earth would click on this crappy ad' type of advertisements. My sites are (very) easily identified by any bot for the type of content within them. This change of ads is either punishment of some sort based on some issue with my sites that I am not aware of, or it is a glitch in the system where sites cannot accurately be identified for specifically themed ads. No idea what is causing this but my CPC rates and RPM rates are continuing to plummet.

I'm seeing these ads too. Probably the doldrums of January as ad budgets slowly ramp up - so we get crap/bottom-of-the-barrel ads like these for filler (saw some for earwax removal, skin blemishes and - of course - hemorrhoids!

It's not a fix-all, but try adjusting Ad Balance or manually reviewing the ads/accounts in the Ad Review Center to try and flush them out. You wont get all of them but you will at least feel better for trying : /