I don't get it. Since this update I've tried putting AS on a moderately priced keyword site, and I was seeing about 50 magic number units of money per click, and now, as the week rolls by, adsense optimization or whatever is driving that down to about 8-15 magic number units per click. What the hell is going on? Is adsense deliberately reserving high paying ads for established sites? Are <1000 uniques/day considered a risk or something? I see no reason why these high paying ads were pulled.
If that isn't bad enough, I swear since they started "optimizing" the number of adds that appear in an add unit my ctr has totally tanked!!! And my click tracker has shown that almost 1/2 of all my clicks don't ever get counted by google.
I'd like to know more on this topic. What do you mean by "50 magic number units of money" per click dropping to "8-15"? What I can gather is you're being vague to stay within the TOS and not disclosing the dollar amount for the clicks. This is fine. The purpose of that statement from what I can gather is that your per click payment dropped by like 80% on these high paying clicks. Ok, now here's my contribution to the topic. On one site I have adsense on, my per click payout jumped by 80%. Now these ads aren't supposed to pay this much.. It happened all of a sudden about two days ago. The domain is very established about 5-6 years old.. and has a PR7. I don't know how long this will last, but to me it looks like Google is rewarding older more established sites with higher payouts.
Same thing happened to me, except that my site is only PR 2 with very small number of visits per day. Increase of 200% per click.
Right... just realized.. it's not 80%.. it's actually a 400% increase (4 times). Impressions and actual number of clicks has decreased quite a bit.. overall earnings are much higher though.