During the past week or so, I noticed that my revenue has dropped by 30-50% from where it had been through the first few weeks of the month. This is the first month after several years with AdSense that I actually took it seriously and paid close attention (yes I kick myself daily for this now haha)..... which has paid off (until now) with almost 10x more profit than before, finally into the 3 digit per day range). So I don't know really if this is normal for me or not hehe (well I could go back and see if my past $5/day tended to go down at the end of the month haha) I was nervous it was smart pricing, but I noticed that all of what I would consider "good" advertisers on my site had disappeared right about then (leaving mostly the lame arbitage junk, affiliate sites, and other sites I can't imagine ever converting someone to a sale). The big companies with "real, legitimate products" mostly disappeared. I did some digging and found that some of the company's AdWords were still appearing on Google search results, but I decided to undertake the task of going to every major competitor site of mine and wrote down all the primary AdSense advertisers they were getting as well.... I quickly saw they were not getting the big/quality companies either. Since most of the advertisers I (and my competitors) "are" getting now are, in my opinion, crap.... they might make the situation worse for me, getting me into smart pricing even if I wasn't already, since (without clicking the ads) I have viewed all of their landing pages, and can't imagine anyone in their right mind signing up for them or handing over their cash for the junk they're pawning off (i.e. they will get low ROI from my visitors, which as I understand it, is the key factor in smart pricing). Anyhow, my "theory" (crossing fingers) is that those good advertisers used up their budgets earlier in the month, and that things might go back to normal on the 1st. Does anyone else experience a similar situation in your niche? Perhaps not every month but at least some of the time? If it doesn't improve in a week or two, I'll switch at least for now to YPN (which I was just approved for yesterday). I'm not doing it though until I see if my theory proves true with AdSense, since I just wanna know hehe
Some of your theories may be right but I suspect the drop is the same one that many of us are experiencing during this summer season -- reduced traffic, lower advertiser budgets, less advertiser competition. The best we can do is try to increase traffic.
Weekends are bad for me also but overall my earnings are up and there are plenty of good advertisers.
I'm hoping this is the slow season and things will crank up once everyone goes back to school. I'm pretty sure July is notoriously one of the slowest months of the year.