@forstitomik Yes, this thing will kill a few big box retailers and wipe out travel spending for foreseeable future. I believe a big chunk of entertainment ad spending is travel related, think vacation, concert, and sports. All gone to zero. I more or less operate in that niche too. I am getting completely annihilated with 70% RPM cut and 50% earning cut YoY basis.

I agree to disagree on the depression front. The government did not "handle" the Great Depression. They chose to do nothing and was pretty much stuck with doing so. Partly because money was tied to gold, and they could not "imagine" or "print" gold reserve as easily as now. And the president was an idiot back then.

We have this RPM collapse for ~1 month and it's already pretty crazy. Imagine having that for a decade. Thus, I do want corporates and government to max out their imaginary credit lines and unlimited credit limits to inject liquidity into the system. So that companies that can survive and prosper, will get proper funding, and in turn spend that money. It is not a bad thing.

The worst thing that can happen, is if 1. virus mutates to turn us into zombies and kill us all, 2. general public realizes that money is fraud, and stop working to riot and start revolutions (most likely target and kill asians like me :( "China" virus bs), 3. or countries get into war due to printing of money / debts, and kill us all. In any of these three scenarios, everything pretty much goes to hell anyways and we will probably die. No need to work anymore, we will literally fight for survival.

In our current society, much of the economic output is electronic and data transfer. The topdogs do need to let a few outdated dinosaur companies simply bankrupt and die out of this crisis. I do think they are letting the cards fall in that segment.

But our entertainment niche is screwed.

Just bobbin keeping my head above the water.

I look at it like this.

Aslong as I do not take any payments from the Government and or ask to have my bills be held for 3 months. I will find myself in a better position then most at the end of this #*$! show Covidemic.

One thing I simply don't get though, I have days where I get more sales on Amazon then I do in ad clicks on my site. I truly still think Adsense is being ran in safe mode.

As for money in the future, bring on Defi with maybe a splash of XUSD?!?

There has never been a better time then now for Block chain to decentralize the internet and get rid of the middlemen platforms we're all forced to use.

I guess in horrible times like this, all we have left to do is day dream.

Since I don't want to always be ranting negatively on this forum...things have been oddly steady over here. Not great, or anywhere near last year, but that's more to do with the January Algo update than anything else. Though, even then, I'm seeing a pretty steady increase in traffic, as well.

Knock on wood that it continues, I guess.

I don't expect things to stay steady for too long, given the circumstances, but you never know...

adsense RPM is low since the coverage is down more than 25%

Just viewed my earnings of today and there was a time I was viewing it several times a day. My RPM was in December about 55-60 cents, now it's about 12-15 cents. I know it's low although it's finance as a niche but there's a high volume with about 1.5 million pageviews a month.

With these numbers I've made the right choice to show about 80 percent of other ads than Adsense thanks to Admanager as an ad server. I'll only raise the impressions when my RPM starts to climb but the trend of the last years just accelerated and it was dying anyways.

Seeing a weird jump in RPM today, it doesn't make sense. Advertisers bidding in money to get a piece of that stimulus check?

Also seeing a much higher epc today. Like frankleeceo says, maybe advertisers are thinking people will have some money to spend now that the stimulus checks are hitting bank accounts.

Rising CPMs = WARNING SIGN
We analyzed ad tech bankruptcies since 2017 and found that CPMs tend to sky-rocket before implosion. We have two theories as to why

More often than not, those same firms are paying smaller pubs late, who ultimately turn them off, reducing supply, increasing CPMs for the bigger pubs.

The intermediary will adjust their own rev share to offer higher CPM payouts to pubs, in an effort to win / keep business.

If you see any combination of the following, take note. Each one alone is not a big deal. Two of them = orange flag. 3 of them = red flag

Skyrocketing CPMs (relative to others, different then "high" CPMs - benchmark)

Flight of high level execs, founders, co-founders

Delayed payments or extended terms

Layoffs

The cherry on top is if they are Private Equity backed. Lots of blow-ups were P/E backed, stretched and levered to the teeth.

Credit: u/OAREX_CM on reddit.com/r/adops/

Yesterday was promising, now back to the pit!

still seeing low RPMs, no change. 65% US traffic.

Still bad.

Cpc ctr...
All it's matter is:
- Traffic good and up
- Revenye is down by 60% to 70% this month...

It is getting a little bit better, Page-RPM is about 50% down / CPC about 60%.

Still horrible over here. Im getting all kinds of click protection js codes loading from my ads now.

qs_click_protection_fy2019.js
window_focus_fy2019.js
load_preloaded_resource_fy2019.js
kiss_one_click_handled_v2
loki_with_borders_click_protection
one_click_handler_one_afma_fy2019.js

Maybe they loaded before and I didn't notice? As it seems I've been wasting a lot of time on Page Speed Insights lately making sure im obeying the all mighty G, that I noticed these loading there now :/

saturday and today seems better, clicks and coverage have risen. Hope this sticks.

The thing I've always hated about Adsense is the amount of money they remove from my account daily; supposedly for invalid clicks (even though I follow all of the positioning rules) or corrections. For instance earlier today, I made about $45 but 2 hours later it was $43 and 7,000 more pageviews. Last week I had about $41 early in the day and 3 hours after that I had $19. How do they justify such big swings...and this seems to happen all of the time with me. It's a daily occurrence. It seems like I lose about $40 a day on the average from "corrections."

@gatormark
The real time clawbacks are super frustrating. I experience this too. I was getting huge end of the month clawbacks too for awhile. I removed all link units and it stopped. But I still have the real time clawbacks happen frequently.

@Frost_Angel, ...and I don't even use ad link units on my main websites.

I get my clawbacks in live mode and its driving me nuts :D I've noticed numerous times each day since Covid started I get a jump in revenue, then get shaved, then revenue becomes stagnant as if my server has no traffic on it while it has 50+ concurrent all day long, after said shave, site will generate little to no revenue.

My Adsense account NEVER received such shaves in almost 2 decades being an Adsense Publisher... But sure during this Covid 19 issue, it happens on a DAILY basis.

So frustrating to say the least. But I am almost 100% certain Adsense is broken since their update before a pandemic. *facepalm*

yes realtime clawbacks occur frequently. :(

I've seen quite a few real-time clawbacks the past month or so (or maybe I've just been paying more attention). Not a whole lot, but enough to get my hopes up before they're dashed again. Usually earlier in the day.

My problem with these sorts of things is that I just have to take Google's word for it. But that's what we signed up for, I guess.

Also HUGE spike in traffic today because another website linked one of my pages. I'm always iffy about referral traffic spikes. Should be a good thing with increased revenue...but at the same time I'm always worried Adsense will flag it and do something gnarly to my account. Bleh. Hasn't happened in the past, but with the way Adsense works I just never know...

The only thing they don't shave is their Vignette ad with average of 20% CTR the past week, no shaves there though. But my main ad positions, if they get about 2% CTR, you sure bet they taking that money from me.

I sat and watched a person land on my site today from GOOGLE. They got to page 2 in my archives for a category... So I watched what they did for a total of 47 minutes. They even came from a super small town so it made watching their actions even easier. But said person viewed over 60+ pages on my site, and GOOGLE logged 20+ clicks from them over a duration of 47 minutes. Google gave me 0 revenue for any of the clicks.

Just handing out FREE advertising now are we. Even if they come from G. Maybe users are already clicking the 3 ads on G search engine as they work there way through Googles spamming non user friendly search display, then once they land our pages and do any clicks. G is like hold on you've clicked to many ads.

I have decided NOT to look at Adsense ALL DAY today, so that I can stay focused on delivering content.

China is back in business BTW as I have a few conference calls today with clients from there; such as Aukey. I have never felt more PRO towards working to getting Adsense OFF my site. Hopefully many of ya'll get opportunities in the comings weeks to do such as well.

Is anyone else getting ads.txt warning for sites that have ads.txt files that have been in place for over a year?

I've been getting warnings for a large number of domains for weeks, despite the fact that the files are there (as they have been for 1-2 years).

Separately, is anyone getting Policy Center warnings for pages that 1) deliver 404/410 error codes (which should tell the Google crawlers the pages are no longer valid) and 2) where the pages listed in #1 don't have any Google Adsense code on them?

It is incredibly confusing to get Policy Center alerts for pages that don't exist (i.e. a 404/410 page is returned) especially when the 404/410 page does not have any Google Ad code on it.

I'm seeing a LOT of other non-Adsense Google related Search errors but will restrict my questions to the ones above since this is the Adsense forum.

I have no problems with clawbacks, but I stay away from Adsense Links and I block a lot of green Download buttons.

My problem is that eCPM is -60% for the same traffic compared with March, and March was not really a good month.
Almost each day I see a small decrease in eCPM and this is a big problem.

I'm getting sick of messages of policy violations. I had about 6 or 7 messages this year and today a new one. Each of them at pages from 2012 to 2018. Nothing wrong with it and each previous time after an audit by a real person it was okay.

Very annoying and time wasting for those few pennies left these days.

Link ads are my main source of revenue :)

No violations here ever, same ad positions for over 5 years. Im telling yall their system is in safe mode atm with absolutely 0 f's given.

Yesterday was horrible BTW, main ad position has been 15-30$ RPM for half a decade, with lows beginning January at around $10 RPM. With this covid, were anywhere from 2-5$.

I am even seeing Adsense run Media.net ads now, that's how garbage the fill rate is atm in the Adsense network.

Sure be nice if there was a global ad publishing union out there we all could join and force G to take it on. It would be epic to have boots inside G that protect us Publishers, but we all know that would never happen. As I personally feel that all the shaved revenue, doesn't always make its way back into the accounts of the Advertisers. Feel free to change my mind on that matter tho ;)

At most, just check Adsense earnings once at the end of the day, there will be less drama. There's really no need to know all the intricate details of how it operates on their end, what matters is the monthly check and if it compares favorably with competitors.

The way things are, I wouldn't wait a month to look at Adsense or you'll have many bills unpaid. Use the drops in Adsense stats daily/weekly to reach out to brands and advertisers directly and simply work to get rid of the middleman and provide a better experience for both the advertisers & yourself.

Yesterday I landed 1000 postings for Chinese brands. I am also looking into Tune (used to be HasOffers) looking to build CPL platform for the brands I work with. And with the hundred(s) of blogs that use our site for content, I will be pushing this CPL platform onto them soon too.

I have also exercised the thought of selling my websites and buying a home in the Carib's once this Rona is over ;)

Either way, even with Adsense down 60-80% for us, we are working to better our site, build our traffic, improve functions and expand into different markets. No way we're going to just continue the same routine we have for years seeing as the same routine currently brings in oppressed revenue which never creates a great work atmosphere.

So it's back to pre 2000 tactics, and that's working directly with clients.