I'm not sure, but I think that the honeymoon with google is over. Looks like they have made deep cuts for publishers. For my sites its like that they using a way-back machine since months now. - Every month - though constant traffic - more content pages - beter PR, income is decreasing considerably. Are they losing advertisers? or are they becoming more tricky or complicated sophisticated nowadays? What's your experience now?
As they optimize to better the value for advertisers, the publishers will slightly lose out. That's how things go.
I think that they start to struggle and that they are not getting enough advertisers any longer. It could be an update issue which created some bugs as well, since the results in my account are wrong today (mathematically)
They have wayyy too many publishers. They let everyone and their cats become publishers. That dilutes the pool of high paying advertisers.
they are absolutely going down slowly, with so many reported bad reputations about advertise with them, high percentage of clickfraud, mfa sites, zombie & proxy clicks, and other cheating method which i dont know ..