Adsense, the descent into hell of income for digital slavery
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Adsense revenue, on average, has been reduced by a minimum of five since 2017. Lots of mistakes and shenanigans on the part of Google which explains the current mess.
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I have been an Adsense publisher for over ten years and have had my share of troubles with the loss of Adsense income. The audience for my sites has remained stable and I even have increases on most of them. In a normal world, ad revenue should automatically follow. If you optimize your pages the same way and produce the same content, which was already paying off before, there is no reason for that to change. It must increase.
Unexplainable Loss of Adsense Income
But at Adsense, it’s the exact opposite. You can have a comfortable audience, and even on the rise, you will have a gradual decline until you hit a floor of poverty. Because Adsense income is modular.
You have a few months of the year that are good and the rest are crap. Shitty months are: January, February and March, July and August and Good are: April, May, June and Very Good are: October, November and December. But in Adsense for 2019 and beyond, your August income will be the same as December!
And from there it will not move. The Adsense team made monumental mistakes, but they also took advantage of many stupid decisions at European level to break the financial backbone of publishers.
GDPR decapitated Adsense publishers
Anyone with an Adsense account who has a European audience will noticed it right away. One of the prerogatives of the GDPR is to reduce data collection and avoid ad targeting. For years before GDPR, Google had been using ad targeting. Basically, it would take your account data such as browsing history, your queries, your location to show you ads.
The GDPR went into action on May 25, 2018 and my Adsense revenue was beheaded by 70 % on May 26, 2019. On forums and other blogs, others have had the same decline. And there is only one explanation, Google used the GDPR, either to slash prices even more or to eat up the margin on publishers.
Because yes, Google had said it would remove ad targeting after GDPR, but it’s impossible to do it in 24 hours. It took between 4 and 6 months for all the other advertising agencies to bring themselves up to standard. This is not the first time that Google has used laws to its advantage. Knowing that he requested the consent of the targeting ad subsequently, therefore, Adsense revenue should not have been impacted and returned to the rise thereafter. In this month of grace in October 2019, we are still waiting and things got worse.
Auto ads and AMP are a disaster
GDPR is one thing, but Adsense’s laziness has done the most damage. In early February 2018, Adsense launched a new format called Auto Ads. The basic principle is wonderful, but the finality smells of piss. There was a sector dedicated to optimize its Adsense ads. The right formats, colors and how to place them down to the millimeter on sites to generate clicks.
But forget all that with automatic Google ads. You place a single line of code on your site header and abracadabra and Google’s machine learning will automatically place Google ads in the right places on your site. Isn’t that beautiful? Yes, on the paper of the managers of Google because in practice it’s a huge bag of trash that has been rotting since 2018.
The first problem is that these ads are displayed on available placements, not on the ad placements that generate the most clicks. To be honest, I use it on all of my sites and my income hasn’t increased one iota. Because people don’t care, dear Adsense, they don’t care and they are totally blind to your automatic advertising! Not to mention the ad blockers which are on the rise.
Adsense is all about automation which will destroy it
You can tell me that the classic formats are still available and that you don’t have to put those stupid auto ads. But Google is forcing to death on these new ads. It will tease you until you put them on for a result close to zero.
And in addition to automatic ads, we get AMP which is imposed to death by Google because it allows it to get its hands on content. And AMP is an abomination for advertising, because half of the ads are not displayed. They disappear into the limbo of code processing.
And obviously, no help. The Adsense forums are as empty as a shopping mall in Chernobyl on April 26, 1986. And the official team is duck out. At one time, if you earned more than the minimum (70 euros per month), you could contact them by email. Today there is no way to contact them. Just their shitty knowledge bases that have automatic responses.
For new webmasters and entrepreneurs, avoid Adsense even if it is impossible
For newcomers, I would recommend not to use Adsense at all. If you have the opportunity, switch to other types of monetization like affiliate or donate or sell. Because in addition to a monthly salary equivalent to that of Nigeria or Bangladesh in terms of Adsense income (if you’re lucky), you’ll have to self-censor a lot. Almost everything is banned on Adsense, or almost all of it. After all, if you’re a in Beauty, Cooking, or Kitten YouTuber, that’s fine.
Affiliation, I have never been able to practice it. Its biggest is that the income is more modular than that of Adsense. And that you have to work constantly 24 hours to get a few cents here and there. Why do you think everyone is rushing to Amazon or Gearbest lately? Because you only need to sell 2 or 3 good products per month to have an Adsense equivalent with advertisements 24/7!
Adsense in 2019 is a disaster. And it can be said that there are alternatives to Adsense. No there is not. I have tested them all. Because Google, at the start of Adsense, beheaded all competition by slashing prices again and therefore, by condemning web entrepreneurs to digital slavery.
Thank you Google !
