@gatormark

You can technically have a bidding war even if you can only submit one bid.

The definition of a bidding war is pretty straight forward:

A bidding war refers to a circumstance in which two or more prospective buyers of a property compete for ownership through incrementally increasing bids.

source: [investopedia.com...]

Without incremental bidding there can be no bidding war. Also remember that bids are kept secret until the end. A late arriving participant can't simply place a bid higher than the current highest bid. So no you can't have a bidding war in first price option.

Unfortunately, this method requires many bidders for the “war.”

Your intuition is good here, yes many bidders are good in fact essential, but that is simply describes high demand and increased demand === higher prices.

This makes me think of one reason where a first price auction is better than second price auction. When there is only 1 bidder, admittedly this is an edge case, in the first price auction the winning bid will be the price submitted whereas in second price auction the winning bid would be a penny (or what ever the price increment is). So in an extreme low demand scenario first price auction may provide a better result.

@Lisa01

i don't get why my CTR has halved

Low demand impacts not only price but the quality of the ads. Under high demand prices are pushed up and thus the ads shown need to be of good quality that is have a high likelihood of being clicked, thus the ads are more targeted. Whereas in low demand market, when prices are very low, advertisers can show spammy ads, where the buyer doesn't care about who sees the ads and isn't looking for a high CTR, think earwax ads. As a result you get low prices, CPC, and low CTR. Once demand pickups again ahead of Valentine's day you should see the quality of the ads increase with CTR and CPC, and of course RPM.

@Lisa01

Mine has too and the only thing I can think of, is a much less inventory of good ads available for your site and mine, ads that were doing well but now are not available.

Hope that makes sense, it's what I seem to think is happening unless someone can shed some light.

Thanks you @NICKMNS and @allhearts. I'm also noticing a difference of about 20 percent in page views between Adsense and Analytics. All this started after the Tcf error. Earlier, it was near about perfect.

Now the ad-rates are starting to go up.
Any how it will stabilize after mid feb.
[adrevenueindex.ezoic.com...]

@NickMNS

Thank you, I didn't see your post before I posted mine, that makes sense.

@Niresh12495

Yeah, very slowly but I am also seeing an improvement.

That chart by the way is pretty much how my revenue has gone over the last few months.

@allhearts
Yes, but the adindex is not always proportional to the adrevenue, adrevenue depends on several factors like niche, adsize, competition etc.

@Niresh12495

Understood.

Are the schools still closed in the US? What about online classes?

Lisa01, it depends on the school district, city, county and state. The US the education system is very decentralized. Some districts are open for in person learning, some for in person and online learning and some only offer online learning. Some districts are extending Christmas break. Same with colleges and universities. It's all over the map and a giant mess.

Thank you @ember

In the last week, I had a lot of US traffic, but it feels like there is a glass ceiling again.

The problem is the eCPM, that is significantly lower than December 2020.

Hello,

In my case, the good trend continues, with regular and predictable earnings, like in the old good times.

@JorgeV

That’s great to hear. Things are going well for me too, but not like the good-ole days, yet. I find it a little surprising that things are going well for me since I rely so heavily on students and COVID has the educational system topsy-turvy.

Anyway, I’m up 55%+ over last January. So, I’ll take it.

What about the page views, Gatormark? Are they also up?

@Lisa01

No, my page views are down 18%. So, it’s a little strange that revenue is up so much when page views are down. But ad clicks are up 22%.

Great to hear that, @gatormark. Mine has been so bad lately that I'm looking for a good alternative now. BTW, What's your average RPM?

@Lisa01

RPM is very dependent on the month (season) and industry, so there's not much you can tell from RPM unless you are comparing similar industries.

What industry are you in, generally speaking?

I'm in education niche as well and get around 70 percent traffic from the US

@Lisa01 and @gatormark,

Revenue is up by 199%,

Ckicks up by 200%

Page Views down 26%

Lisa are you usingbonly fixed units or auto ads?

@Lisa01

My RPM can be anywhere between $.80-2.35 depending on the month and whether school is in session or not.

Hi @AlexB77!
Neither. I've placed all the ads manually and they're responsive.
Thank you, @gatormark

My current RPM is £12.00 -16.00 and Impression RPM is £3.00 - 5.00

Both up from last year RPM by 300% and Impr. RPM by 120%

Try using autoads for a few days to see if you situation improves. Be sure to monitor your bounce rate while using auto ads.

Even my RPM was something similar to yours @AlexB77. But now it's not even half of what it used to be. I removed auto ads because it slowed down my site with toooo many ads

@Lisa, you can control the number of ads displayed and ad placements, so that you are not running into the page load issues.

Okay. I'll give it a try

@Lisa

I forgot to mention that my pageviews are in the 2.4 to 3.8 million page views per month range.

I kinda figured, @gatormark. Thank you

@AlexB77

Since many publishers are moving to other revenue sources because they are dissatisfied with Adsense, I wonder if that is helping us; those who stick with Adsense. Things have definitely been improving over the past 3 months. 2020 was horrible for me, but now it looks like 2019 again, revenue-wise.

Today may be my best day in over a year. That bodes well for me because January is typically one of the worst months for me.

@gatormark

AdSense is one of my many revenue streams for many years now. I have been using it since 2003 but have had to look for other revenue streams such as Media.Net and even direct advertising.

"Things have definitely been improving over the past 3 months."

They definitely do. I see a huge improvement in January, especially after the 16th, things have started to go up again gradually.

Most of my traffic is from the US, followed by other English-speaking countries and around 8.7 - 9.8 million monthly page views. It looks like I am going to be able to keep all my employees this year. I really do not want to let any of them go, especially during the pandemic.

So far, yesterday was the best day of the year for me. We shall see how things will play out today for us.

@AlexB77

Yeah, I hope things work out for you and your employees. Fortunately, I only have myself to worry about. I don't need to do a lot of work with my sites, so the income is somewhat passive.

I got rid of Media.net a couple of years ago. It was doing very well for a while and then died. I moved to Exponential which was much better than Media.net until COVID hit. It's still slow-moving. I started focusing on paid memberships and that saved me in 2020. Paid memberships ended up being about 36% of my 2020 revenue. These days you can't just rely on Adsense!