When viewing my website traffic versus payout over the last 2+ years, there seems to be a clear trend: 1) My traffic is going up 2) Payouts from adsense are going down Maybe this is normal, but certainly starts to make running my own program more attractive. Have others experienced this as well?
Same here. Joined the program one year ago. My best month was the third one. after that it was all down the hill. Trafic increased, click no increased, pay per click droped constant (today i average per click about 10 times less than one year ago). I blamed smartpricing, but why is it my fault that the advertisers are also using adsense to monetise their sites. How can my users convert when the ad leads to a MFA or a ringtone scam? Right now my ecpm is close to what a CPM ad will pay, so I might drop adsense and go for CPM banners.
ok, good. So it is not just me. I am not actively trying to "work the system" on adsense. I just post the ads on some well trafficked communities to help with the cost of hosting, etc. I pretty much could make more money now very easily. It is just something on my "to do" list, and now that earning are not what they used to be I am closer to starting to work directly with advertisers (not necessarily from adwords).
All I can say is I haven't had this happen personally, but I have had ups and downs. Well, I guess it HAS happened to me, but then there was a rebound. Sometimes it's a single advertiser driving it, I suspect. What sometimes revives adds is making minor changes to the display or the header.
I've noticed the opposite. Well, half-opposite anyway I think a lot depends on your particular site and the focus of its content. Intraday or even intraweek values go up and down, but the overall trend of earnings is up. As are impressions.
I think there is another factor involved. Just like banner ads, people begin to ignore AdSense because it is so commonplace. You almost have to trick someone to get them to click on the ads. I saw the same thing happen with banner ads in the 1990s. Initially, tons of people clicked on them, and then it dribbled down to almost nothing. Then people started using tricks, like ads that looked like drop-down boxes. Once someone clicked on one of those and realized that they were fooled, they rarely did it again. Today, it's animated Flash banner ads with an interactive "shoot the gopher" or "punch the clown" theme.
Bottom line a significant % of advertisers have just dumped the content network or significantly reduced their max CPC. 2 - 3 years ago everyone went all out to see what it can do...now they've seen it and the results dictate dropping the spend. I think the upcoming changes (transparency coming to the content network) will have a positive impact on quality publishers. Like others, I've seen a drop off both in terms of the average rpc as well as the total monthly revenue despite increases (although slight) in traffic.
Been with them a year. Finding that month on month income is remarcably similar as far cpc is concerned. Thus far the amount has been very correlated with traffic. Then again, my earnings are pretty small, so may be this effect of traffic to earnings you talk about might be more true for those with a lot of traffic.
Could be possible that you get alot of return visitors which usually means that they won't click on your Google ads. New visitors are more-likely to click on ads.
I would have thought that, too, but my stats are showing almost neck and neck between the two groups. Certainly no difference of any statistical significance. And again I qualify this by saying "on my site"