The best ads go to google's favorite sites. We are left with crumbs. I used to have at least 20 cents per click Until March last year, then the CPC fell more and more, now it's down Also to 4 cents per click a few days. Google also penalizes affiliate content, if you sell advertising, it wants everything to revolve around it And you can't earn anything anymore

They got rid of CPC about a month and half ago now and its purely on impressions, whats strange though is the end of the first month everyone was still getting money deducted for fake clicks which doesn't make any sense as no one is paying per click anymore, unless of course they are and G pockets that and just gives us a percentage of the impression pennies!

Only google knows if there are clicks, with them everything is based on trust, whether you invest in theirs. advertising that you publish on the sites. That is to say, they have free rein on everything, so you'll never know how things really went

The money slashed at the end of month in the name of invalid click was definitely going into very deep pockets. Google advertising business is not transparent. Google is not Google, its actually Go-Ogle. They just combined 2 words and fooled us for more than 2 decades.
People kept silent because at the end they were making good money. Now people have started talking about unfair (criminal) practices of monopolistic mafia.

Today I shutdown 1 of my website after 13 years. It slowly lost all the traffic after HCU updates that pushed Quora / reddit / stackoverflow results on top. Also in past people kept stealing images from my website. It was basically an educational website. I found my website images that i made in photoshop and illustrator several years ago unfairly used by businesses and spam websites and they did not even bother to give credit or backlink. Instead they were topping the image results on Google and my website image results were way down.

And now AI tools stole rest of the information from my articles and giving direct answers to queries and intentionally giving wrong references to make sure people do not go to original website from which data was stolen.

It's now useless to run educational websites anymore when at the end AI will steal all the articles data and put it in their own databases.

Has anyone seen any recovery from the earnings drop in March - April ?
Mine dropped 90% at half of march and didn't recover yet, not sure if this is permanent, if I should still keep the adsense html code or not.

Some people have adjusted their settings to optimize for the change from CPC to RPM. The April thread: [webmasterworld.com...] shares ideas. For some, they are doing better.