I call this '$1 scheme' and it means what you are going to earn at the end of the month is pre-determined. Those statistics mean nothing. Millions of webmasters are in such a scheme and won't be making more than $1 per day whatever they do. Take a look at your statistics or put it to test if you want. If you are in such a situation you'll make less than $1 per day regardless of the number of clicks or impressions you get. For instance, one day you get only 1 click and make 0.60, the next day you get 20 clicks and still make 0.81, 0.89, etc. You start your site with 300 impressions and make half a dollar per day. You work a bit harder and reach 2300 daily impressions, but you are still making half a dollar daily. Sounds familiar? I'm sure %90 of you having the same situation with adsense. Whatever you do or however hard you work Adsense will adjust the prices to keep you under $1/day. If you go too agressive in building traffic, they'll lower your search engine rankings to keep your daily revenue still under $1. Google is evil and they've made enough money out of your content. They are making billions out of your work in return for a few cents. Better quit it now and work on something which'll make some real money. That's what I gotta tell you.
Another "Google is malefic" - story. If you work hard you'll improve your earning. If your story is true, how about so many adsense tips which really help us to improve the ctr and cpm ? Search for them and find them here on DP. Then apply what you read, use competitive filter to remove low payed ads... bring more traffic to your website... but quality traffic (from search engines) and check your stats after that.
I already know any tips or tricks discussed here. I started with a video sharing site and was making half a dollar with about 500-600 impressions. As traffic grew I reached 5-6k imressions and was still making less than $1. At that point I had to stop cause it wasn't even paying the server costs. Changed the uploaded videos with embedded ones and left it alone. Then I thought, all right entertainment is not the way to go, and noticed that another 'niche' site of mine was making $1-2 for just one rare click. So I decided to work on that one, hoping I could get at least $6-7 if I get 10 clicks a day but it didn't happen. It's now making half a dollar with 7-8 daily clicks. This is ridiculous. I kept on working and now I have more than 10 sites each getting some traffic and still making less than $1 from adsense with clicks worth 0.01 to 0.05 cents. I only didn't start a blog about 'mesothelioma lawyers'. Lol. I'm sure I'll still be making less than $1 even if I do it now. Perhaps Adsense only works for US based people. Who knows.
I respect your opinion, and understand clearly your concerns. However, I think you're talking about smart pricing. I believe this is the tactics of some advertisers when they feel that the ad clicks are not being converted into sales well enough. This means that probably the ad clicks are not coming from the targeted traffic, search engine that is. Just my 2 cents.
If you can generate sales (affiliate) then you can wipe out Google and become the middleman. If you do well then you wont have to worry about crummy 10 cent profits for the trouble of advertising websites that you probably would not approve of promoting in the first place. If you can't make sales and just want to produce content then Adsense is currently the best option on the market; it will always be this way until networks stop being so greedy and they begin to offer higher revenue shares. Maybe Microsoft will be contenders to do this in the near future.
Though your rant is understandable, I still feel you can earn a lot (at least, a respectable amount!) if you work harder going with my personal experience. Find a niche that is not too competitive and try to get more US based traffic which may improve your earnings. If not, join a suitable affiliate network.
Well, conversions will never be enough for advertisers. Although I tried advertising, most of the times all traffic is from search engines. But you're kind of right, cause since that advertising adventure, all my sites went down to 0,01ish clicks. Well, now I don't trust anything online when it's not under my control. If google is not being fair, those affiliates won't be fair at all. Right now I'm building my own script, once finished I'll launch my site which (hopefully) won't need Google. It could take up to 6 months to finish but worth trying rather than relying on a few damn bucks from google.