I found the culprit for me. I was getting several visits per hour from a server that was clicking ads. I use analytics and statcounter. I couldn't figure it out at first because the adsense "exit clicks" were not showing up on statcounter. But when I checked I saw they were going to older pages with 0 traffic from years ago. Those pages showed 1-2 visitors and a 500% CTR on analytics and the bot was the only visitor to those pages as shown on statcounter. I used the wordfence plugin to block the hostname and RPMs seemed to have stabilized.

Most of my traffic is mobile and unfortunately desktop pays much better, at least in my niche. So my CPC and RPM are down. At least the numbers are normal. I'm sure I will get a big crawl back at the end of the month.

For anyone who is interested this is the info about the bot:

The "ISP" was "Heg Us"

Hostname - *.inaddr.ip-pool.com
Hostname - *.dedicatedpanel.com

NetRange: 207.38.80.0 - 207.38.95.255
[4096 addresses in this network]
CIDR: 207.38.80.0/20 (207.38.80.0 - 207.38.95.255)
[4096 addresses in this network]

and

NetRange: 209.126.96.0 - 209.126.127.255
[8192 addresses in this network]
CIDR: 209.126.96.0/19 (209.126.96.0 - 209.126.127.255)
[8192 addresses in this network]

Probably owned by Alphabet.

Stats are stuck this morning (9:30 ET)

looks like stuck

my stats are stuck too... ick.

For me, February was sort of a miracle, but as a miracle, it doest not last.
The last two days come with the usual minimum bidding and dispair.

seems stat start moving but still some part of impressions missing. not sure if we will get those back

Anybody behind on stat ? Still some part from the morning missing

Stats are stuck again

Yep, they are stuck!

This company, Alphabet, Google, whatever, must be broken up, shattered - to paraphrase John F. Kennedy - into a million tiny pieces.

They are a danger to freedom, to culture, to the entire world. They are uncontrolled, unregulated and are exercising the smashing hand of totalitarianism over the internet. They are untrustworthy and evil.

They seek to eliminate all but their partners. They are criminals and should be prosecuted as a criminal enterprise, along with Amazon, Facebook, and other Silicon Valley companies.

(just had to review 14 pages that have been reviewed in the past. They are systematically harassing me and reducing visitors and revenue. I am sick and tired of their rule over the internet.)
/rant over.

Your stats get stuck and you will never see that revenue again. This company needs to go. Crooks. Plain and simple. Justice Department's anti-trust division can't prosecute too soon. Break them up. Slay this horrendous beast.

Here's what frosts me, and is evidence of criminal behavior, whether done by AI or humans, because humans program the AI.

The weekends have become my best days in terms of revenue, page views, etc. This morning I get up and check my Adsense stats. They are horrible. Revenue the lowest of the month, and that's a Saturday, with the highest number of pageviews of the month, but, oddly, impressions are suspiciously low. In a minute, I find out why. I have policy violations on 10 of my best pages. These are pages that have had policy violations in the past and which I've corrected, even though they're nothing, but I'm just playing in Google's sandbox, right?

Anyhow, I am in the policy review and notice that the "latest enforcement action" is February 21. That's two days ago and I know these pages were not flagged on my dashboard because I check for policy violations every day, every damn day, and often two or three times.

So, Google puts me in policy prison, with "restricted ad serving" for two days without letting me know. And, BTW, the policy they claim that I'm in violation of is adult content, which it is clearly not, as there are no photos on the page and every mention of questionable words (I've had to eliminate the words "sex", "nude", "provocative" and others from my lexicon) has been scrubbed and eliminated.

When you request a review of your site or various pages, Google throws up a message that says they will inform you when the review is complete. I've done 40 or 50 reviews and have yet to see a message from Google of a completed review. Squat, Nothing.

These people are a criminal enterprise. They don't pay taxes, treat government like some ugly wart, and their customers like slaves to their deity, the almighty Google.

If they're doing things like this to me, and I'm very much small peanuts, what are they doing to other sites, on a systematic basis, over and over and over again, to bolster their bottom line, or to push small operators out of business, or to benefit their allies. There's plenty of suspicious behavior going on at the "plex" and it needs to end.

Sunday...
This is really bad!
Very low revenue

Cost per click for today - £0.01

Genuinely astonished.

Someting is wrong indeed

What are you making currently per day?

1) <10 USD
2) 10 > x < 50 USD
3 ) > 50 USD

I m dancing around 3) these days from over 250 USD 18 months ago

I just went back to my Adsense dashboard and they show 4 pages with policy violations, but when I open them up I see 15. Just a bunch of liars and thieves.

I am switching over to alternatives. I wouldn't switch earlier because G paid the most. Now, due to having to minimize the language on my site and the very ultra-low revenue, the other alternatives such as media.net and the Moneytizer are looking better and better.

Google can KMA.

Looks like a massacre cross the board

Yes, something ia broken, as my figures in Admanager are fixed in the last 10 hours or so.

Stuck since 10AM GMT today.

On track for possibly my worst day in many YEARS, since maybe 2004. 3 clicks. Horrible. Somebody stick a fork in Google. They're done.

Sure, let's just let algos loose with AI. Show them how smart we are. Not a winning strategy.

Hey, I guess there's almost nobody left around here. It would serve Google right if everybody using Adsense switched over to another ad serving platform and let them rot in the muck of their own creation.

I noticed that there are very few people posting in the AdWords or Google Ads section any more. Maybe it's simply time to look elsewhere. As a small publisher, I'm going with media.net. Their CPMs aren't the greatest, but now that Google has lowered itself down to "just another one" status, what's the difference?

I've had nearly two months of very substandard returns from Adsense, besides being needled almost daily with their stupid policy violations that are almost 100% nonsense. I'm making some radical changes to my business plan and none of them include Google in any way, shape or form. Sure, my sites will still be on their crumby SERPs, but there are alternative search engines to take their place which do a better job. I use Bing all the time and have gotten plenty of goodies through their rewards program.

After I've gotten adsense out of my system and media.net fully implemented, then I'm going to go after my own advertisers. I used to publish newspapers and if there's one thing I am good at, it's selling advertising.

Good luck to all, and hope to see you on the other side of Google's self-inflicted implosion. (Keeping my fingers crossed that the "don't be evil" company goes the way of the dodo.)

Edit: the past FOUR DAYS revenue are about equal to an average day from 2014. That's a 75% drop. Unacceptable in my book.

Very interesting to see any true comparison between media and adsense

I use both media.net and Adsense and sometimes media shows adsense ads - so there is no getting away from it.

Anyone else experiencing a record day for 2020. Both Adsense and Exponential are going to be record days for me in 2020. However, still down 20% overall from last year.

Delayed stats notice.

@fearlessrick, whenever I have an Adsense policy violations for a page, I just dynamically replace the code on that page with code that doesn't use AdSense ads. I'll use other providers like Exponential, Media.net, and Infolinks, etc. instead of Adsense.

Adsense rev is normal for the time of the year. Slightly up compared with same month last year

CPC around 0,10 €
CPM around 12,00 €

Anyone have a big adsense yo-yo effect today? e.g. up and down and sideways? I know they announced a problem with ad manager - but they have *Not* announced a problem with adsense...just wondered...

@gatormark, good policy. I think I'll go that way.
Day one of adsense vs. media net results (not actual numbers, just percentage of total, and they're the only two I have running (BTW: I used to get good results from infolinks, but no more, can't seem to get RPM above .04, which is ridiculous).
Adsense: 60%
Media.net: 40%

Good start. All I've done is put media.net ads above Adsense ads in verticals. There are banners for both on most pages and more adsense than media.net overall. Many pages I have not even begun to work on changing.

As this goes forward, I will be eliminating Adsense from most pages and adding media.net to more pages. Eventually, media.net will be 100%, Adsense 0%.

Can anyone tell I don't like being used or abused?

Edit: I'd rather make less and not be constantly hectored by Adsense policy violations (i.e., censorship). I'm one of those people who would rather die standing than live on my knees.