For the first time since joining AdSense I have failed (by a matter of pennies) to make the minimum amount to get a payment next month.

Rgds

Damon

Sign of the times I guess.
What do you put it down to? Traffic, Clicks or earnings per click?

There was a big drop in both visits *and* page RPM, even though I'd previously seen the normal winter rise in traffic towards Christmas and a steady-ish RPM.

I assume that this was as a result of SERPs changes, possibly in part because I could no longer afford to handle the huge 'hotlink' image bandwidth load that G was dumping on my servers, which meant that I was having to 503 most of the hotlinking, which G may have taken umbrage over. Dunno.

I had also shut out a lot of the third-party networks and more dubious ad categories some time before, and it may have taken a while for the effects of that to kick in, but I'm sticking with the SERPs (ie traffic volume and type) issue as being primary.

Rgds

Damon



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/01/2013 11:20AM by DamonHD.

SERPS

Everything for me has been, more of less static, CTR EPC, ignoring daily gyrations.

Yes I also just missed the minimum some months back. Actually last month was the best for me in about 12 months.

No I won't be opening champagne bottles.

Overall I'm down 98% on five to ten years ago. No I don't smile when I say that.

I guess I'm still lucky. Never missed any payout since I started with Adsense. Still remember getting my first USD checque from them, realizing this is for real.

CPC is still rising but CTR dropped dramatically over the years. Overall income is declining year by year. But I reached payout for this month on December 3rd (December always being my best month).

Usually Christmas is good for me, but this one won't be, I don't think!

Rgds

Damon

Hi Damon,
I don't think the Goog would hold a grudge over the blocked hotlinking, you seem to pinpoint it as a sign of less traffic, I never follow those serps algo changes discussions, even now when I am actually missing a huge chunk of my traffic, I'd rather put my energy into building more content.

Speaking of "energy" & "content", could those be related to what you're observing? Meaning, you're drifting away from growing your online assets as your offline energy projects grow? Our beast needs constant feeding.

I attribute my drop in traffic to many things, the biggest being that I'm becoming the most copied site in my niche, there isn't a day without at least 4 or 5 heavy copy attempts, + constant non-stop slow scraping in the tens daily. I've dedicated the last month to teaching myself coding and am slowly moving towards automating the thief busting, at the price of course of less content development. But even as my earning fall, I am doing this for my own sanity, you have no idea how it feels to be constantly under attack (or perhaps you do), it wakes me up at night.

The usual fixes apply, but knowing your site, I can give more specific 10c worth of advice, while your content payload (picture) is totally original, you could use a lot more appealing "styles" to entice the damn visitors to bookmark, recommend to friends & come back, also the Goog could use more on topic text to feed on, and links inbound & outbound, I know this consumes more time, but hey, you already know time = money, give it some more time if you can.

Thanks for that GB!

Not a lot of available time right now to feed the G monster.

Rgds

Damon

I'm down to every other month payment these days I can't really attribute it to anything in particular, though I do wonder if adblockers are part of the issue.

I'm sure that adblockers must make a huge dent on the return per visitor for most if not all sites.

I must have jinxed myself earlier with those comments. Terrible month and highly improbable I'll make the minimum, a reasonable month with Amazon though.

Oh well.

Yes, mine's worse and worse!

Never mind, I just got my main client contract renewed, which rather puts the AdSense revenue into the shade, even for a good month...

Rgds

Damon

Yes, it looks as if I'll be regularly missing the monthly minimum, so I have shut down my Gallery mirror in Singapore to save a bit of dosh, nominally yesterday, though it doesn't seem to have actually died yet!

Rgds

Damon

things ain't what they used to be :-(

I made the minimum last month - only to have some clawed back to just put it under the minimum.

BTW - that contrasts with the olden days of yore with an average $A 8,000.00 monthly.