I was earning about 20k a month in the past good days. Got lazy and hit by google penalties now I can only pay for my dinner . Google is changing rules and you have to follow them to keep your SERP.
I know a guy blogging on banking niche, earning about $1k per month. CTR is very high, getting high CPC.
If you have a high quality site with lots of traffic, it is possible to make A LOT of money with Adsense. I have just a single high traffic site generating millions of page views per month and last month I earned over $9000 with Adsense. This month might be even better. Sadly, I joined Adsense too late. I often wonder what $$$ I could have made if I was running Adsense ads from the very beginning.
Wow 20k is really something. It´s true about keep up with rules and keep SERP...otherwise it's like what happened to you : from 20k to free lunch.
I only have ads on two sites right now. One site is receiving 150-200 uniques a day and the other lost all of it's traffic. I'm earning $10-15/mo between them with minimal content and no backlinking. I've been taking my time and building everything out organically; definitely been slow going though.
I still dream about the $550 days 8 years ago. But, as the old saying goes, all good things must come to an end. I gave up chasing AdSense dollars about 4 years ago. I also gave up on Google 2 years ago, as I don't believe they're a company worthy of trust at this point. I replaced Google Analytics with Piwik. Deleted my GWT account. Dumped all of my GMail accounts in exchange for self-hosted email. It's been the best thing that ever happened to me. I focus on 100% ad free ecommerce at this point, and more or less ignore Google and all of their self-serving rule changes and updates. It's ridiculous that people still think Google updates are about the "quality" of a website. If you still believe that then you're probably in the wrong business.
Well, currently i had 3 sites with adsense on it. 1st site is wallpaper site, only had 600uv per day, 2nd site is wallpaper site too, only had 800uv per day, last site is vector site, it had around 8k uv per day.. currently i get 600 - 700$ per month for all of that sites.
That really something.... never thought that in these days walpaper/vector/etc sites would give so much....
try combine adsense + shutterstock affiliate, my earning from shutterstock almost a half from my adsense .. feel free to contact me if you need details info
I remember my good days when I made $700 a month... But then Penguin and Panda hit... Traffic crashed to a third... Most of my pages which ranked at the top disappeared. Last month, I made only $200. Its not even worth the effort anymore...
The guy aboves' situation is almost identical to mine. Adsense is a scam. They just give you enough hope to continue then shut you down and you spend a year trying to build it up again. They will do it again.
Kinda of skeptical about some of the big bucks posted in this thread.. but then again, been on the internet way too long (first adsense sites were geocities with traffic from yahoo answers) to believe everything that I read. Nothing personal against fellow posters here, just me being me! Anyway, I make adsense payout every three to four months, main reason I don't make the big bucks is these sites are just a hobby to me! Content never was my forte lol!