Ask HN: Does anybody make good money from Google Adsense? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Does anybody make good money from Google Adsense?

110 pointsthescribbblr95 comments

My earnings have dropped since last few months. So, I would like to know if anyone is making a good earning from Google Adsense or the earnings have dropped like mine?

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I used to make decent amount (for my purposes) around $1000 a month. This was when the ads were based on the content. Then a few years ago they based ads on the user (as personalisation is all the rage) which for me was ridiculous as my site was about general social, political and environmental issues, so you'd end up seeing an add about shoes or something you were shopping for on another site which was completely unrelated to why people came to my site and completely out of context so the ad clicks and revenue dropped while site usage was growing. No way to reach a human to change it back. Some option on AdSense implies you can but has not worked.

Also at some point got banned for false clicks except the site they said that was violating their policy was not mine. Their automated responses of course did not help. Only a few months later a friend of a friend who luckily worked on the team was able to reinstate the account (but not the list revenue in the meanwhile if course). turns out they had a big they didn't admit false flagging my site. Wonder how many others they caught out...

Have ended up sticking with them as don't have time to look for alternatives (tried Chiquita but not very good). (The site is a side project only.) Would like to build my own niche for maybe non profits only, though I'm sure someone has done that already so I probably need to just invest some more time to look into it more...

Sorry, I only spotted some auto-correct typos after the ability to edit my reply had passed:

"(but not the list revenue in the meanwhile if course). turns out they had a big they didn't admit false flagging my site."

Should say

"(but not the lost revenue in the meanwhile of course). turns out they had a bug they didn't admit, false flagging my site."

I used to earn couple of thousands dollars a month via my Android games. I created them to learn unity and not to earn money but the games were picked up by some game magazines and took off.

Google then banned the whole account for some "likeness to merchandise" reason. They kept the whole money too

Happened with me too.

Also the thing is they don't provide an option to clarify the things.

Happened to me too. I lost almost $500.And then you keep getting automated mails about the account ban for each ticket.

Yeah I got click bombed I think after purchasing some sites on flippa. Maybe someone else wanted them more. out thousands of bucks plus a lifetime adsense ban.

plus the balance in ad sense which was not too much $100 or so.

Me too. I was making very decent money and opted to convert to Objective-C to see if Apple would approve one of my more popular apps. I couldn't gain any traction and didn't renew my developer account after the first year.

This happened to me a long time ago. I was banned for unclear reasons and lost more than $500. They never explained exactly why and I've been a happy user of ad blockers since, no exceptions.

Which games?

It was called Rickshaw Rage, Monster Truck Rampage, Plane Simulator. Around 2013. I can still see the gameplay on the game magazine sites.

How did Google get away with scummy practice like this?

I joked that taking my money without explanation made for a fascinating legal spectacle. Its not that I care about the 400 euro, I'm honestly interested in their explanation in court. How an agreed exchange can be canceled by one party keeping the money. You can write whatever you like in a TOS legally its a joke, everyone knows this. I know it is no your decision but someone some day should have Google (you) explain for this business formula? or should that be theft? Who knows!

At that point they quickly restored my account. ha-ha

I put some AdSense in my blog then earning like less than 100 bucks, but I left the money untouched, after a couple of years of inactive use of the account, Google sent an email and took my money. I was like WTF

I made about $200 per day and had 500 clicks per day from AdSense, steady for years. Suddenly it dropped to $30 per day and 1-5 clicks overnight. Traffic was consistent, about a million daily page views, and 40k active registered users a day. 1-5 clicks was clearly wrong. I contacted AdSense support and asked if I should try making changes to the ads, or wait for them to debug the issue. They said to wait.

Well, I waited a month as they escalated it to different departments, and someone went on vacation. Finally I get an email with their official answer. It says they can't tell me the issue, because it's classified information. However, I could try labeling the ads, "Sponsored Advertisements".

That's the great support I get after making them about 100k in commission. Thanks Google.

Which website?

I used to work for a company that ran entirely on adsense, (Directories and such) then Google changed the way websites ranked to be more social media friendly and every website tanked. Shares and likes became more important that keywords and semantics and the owner did not know how to adapt to the new SEO model.

> Shares and likes became more important that keywords

Many seem to think so. If true, it means that Google now "Pageranks" not thanks to websites contents maintainers establishing links to other sites, but to visitors posting links on social networks. They switched from the 'authors side' to the 'audience side'.

(Yes, there are many contents maintainers who also are active on social media, however they don't post the overwhelming majority of non-spam links published on social media).

I had a site that had 60k unique visitors a day. Adsense decided it didn't want to show ads on 90% on requests. I was making $150/month with server costs of over $500.

A company approached me to join their private ad network and the next month I earned $5700.

Website?

i made 1500$ from my Nokia phones related blogspot.com site before 2013,then Nokia lost market-share i lost my visitors & revenue.

before panda and hummingbird(mostly panda), SEO is very easy for self hosted WordPress blog, create some post and make more tags ,you easily ranked on google search.

*sorry for my english

I guess now-a-days blogspot/wordpress blogs don't rank in Google search results.

still possible, if u create Informative blog posts...

Have used AdSense on latextemplates.com for 7 years. I wouldn't call it "good money" but it's a welcome addition to my income. Haven't noticed any drop the last several months, but 4 years or so ago there was a huge drop when they updated their algorithm.

I dislike Google and would love to move to something else, but everything I've tried is so much worse so I've just been stuck with it. Any suggestions?

I've heard good things about Ezoic. Haven't personally tested it however.

ezoic is good but they still use at least a portion of google under the hood.

This is correct

I have Ezoic on my site and make about $70/mo. Overall goal is to get rid of ads altogether, but before that I'm looking at MediaVine and/or AdThrive

You could consider making direct deal with advertisers or using affiliate marketing.

Me, 10$K/month. Because of AdSense revenue, I took many hours building a new website (online since last month) and hope that website it will eventually make some money. I really don't like having ads on website I visit but don't use AdBlocker (hide it behind other windows). I think WikWik.org is a great site (I'm the author) and for sure would not have exist without AdSense opportunity.

Which website do you run?

Many sites, but money come mainly (70%) for BestWordList.com and ListesDeMots.Net.

Checked. I liked the design. It's simple and only focus on the content that you need. :) No distractions.

I built a blog in 2008 with few articles and luckily got my account approved in Adsense. after a month I was banned for lifetime with reason of invalid clicks and violating terms. I still don't know why that happened? last I try to re-apply in 2013/14, again I was reject for no reason.

I can really see a monopoly of google in this ad-space. because they can always throttle our traffic if we use other network.

My earnings also dropped, but I would say it's mostly because of their policy changes and not adapting to it.

I wanted to change provider, but most of them are more scammy than AdSense.

How about native ads?

This is some kind of service? If you are talking about selling my own ad space, then it's not possible. I run such a website, that people come, they look around for few minutes, download image and never return.

Which policy changes?

I created and ran a website called jscompress.com for a number of years. In its peak time, I made around $350-500 per month on it, with no maintenance.

2013-2015: $350-$500 per month

2016+: ~$125 per month

I attribute most of this to the rise of ad blockers, which impacted me especially bad because it is a website targeted at developers.

I did a writeup on it and why I sold it: https://vancelucas.com/blog/selling-my-passive-income-stream...

The funny party is many people here reported being banned because of „automated clicks“. When we used adsense for advertising purpose we paid for many clicks which lasted less than 50 milliseconds.

So google is letting advertiser pay for fake clicks, but website owners will not get this money, google keeps it by blocking their accounts.

Once upon a time I was making $1,000 a day with AdSense. Then Panda happened. Now I don't make anywhere near that much in a month.

What’s Panda?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Panda

Nickname for a large ranking rule change which affected a lot of people's rank on Google.

It has been years since I had made money off Adsense, but do a Google search for "smart pricing."

Back in the day, I was making decent money off a new account and then that income dropped off a cliff after a couple months. The issue was that the traffic was low performing and I guess it took a couple months for Google to figure it out.

Take a look at your traffic and how well it might be converting for the people paying for those ads. If you're pretty sure it's crap, then do more searching for how you might make that traffic perform better.

For example, my issue was that I had a lot of traffic coming from developing countries and these people weren't going to buy anything. Another example might be that a site short of content isn't aligning well with the ads which Google is showing.

I used to make $20-30k monthly with flash video games. Saw a click at $150 one day! (Before 2008 crisis!)

Stories please.

Yahoo Ads with the old Revenue Science (Audience Connect now I think) would pay similarly for high traffic file hosting.

Gods we were young back then.

My company (user generated content, user profile pages) reached $10k/mo in 2010 with AdSense. As soon as we crossed that threshold, we started getting automated threats asking to check "all other pages" (we had about 20m user profile pages back then). Despite our best effort (keywords filters in Hungarian and Thai, heuristics), the account was banned when it was earning $17k/mo. Fortunately, my bootstrapped start-up had a freemium model, so I could keep the payroll and seemingly survived this blow (although as I now understand, the long term impact was very negative). I tried to appeal, only to get automated responses. Tried to approach AdSense team via contacts- a few emails, and they stopped responding. Finally , I found some AdSense employee patrolling webmasterworld.com - miraculously, he reinstated the account! We immediately reduced exposure to 5k/mo and sold the remaining inventory first with Exponential and then transitioned to header bidding with 4 different DSPs.

TL;DR Avoid like a plague!!

Google always do the same once you reach a decent amount they ban the account for some silly reasons.

Why?

They give you silly reason like fraud clicks or something like and cease your account.

Yeah, but doesn't Google earn commission based on the revenue from adsense? It seems very odd that they ban accounts when they're also making money.

Also, they cease your earned amount.

Ah, so that's why, they simply rob people systematically.

And without any solid reason.

How is this legal?

I'm guessing, since people/companies are isolated and don't even consider suing a big entity as Google, there's no one that's going to do anything. And the police/law certainly won't go after someone as large as Google. I'd guess that, if EU would take it on, they could bring them to justice, but they seem to only be after GDPR money currently.

Can't people band together and bring a class action lawsuit? Looks like there are enough people screwed over by Google for this to work, isn't it? Even if Google doesn't reinstate the Adsense accounts, they should at least not withhold the money these people already earned

You'd need a driven lawyer to pick up the case and find all the people that want to use, I think it's as hard as finding needles in a haystack to be honest.

So many companies think that their automated processes are great, but then they block users from giving feedback on when it's wrong, so they never hear otherwise.

I make about $50-$70/month from Adsense on my blog. I use a single Auto ad unit in the middle of each article. It would be nice if it were more. They payout every couple of months when the balance gets over $100. When they payout I get a 'report' that tells me they reduced my payout because of 'invalid traffic' (with no details about what/how/when). This deduction varies from about 5-20% of the payout.

Amazing. Blog's link?

http://www.datagenetics.com/

Not any more. And in the end the nice people of G banned me having run the same website unchanged for 5 years.

They ban my account without specifying any reason or what actions have violated their terms of service. I had earned over 500$ from a blog.

Google does

About $400/mo over a few sites. Best earners are B2B, non-tech related (business-related tools rather than content-based). Takes just a few thousand visitors and a few dozen clicks to see that revenue.

Consumer-oriented sites will require many more views to get clicks, and those clicks are worth less. And the rise of ad-blockers and general awareness will have a greater impact there.

My sites are also most-viewed on and optimized for desktop use, as they are used in an office setting. Perhaps with a greater shift to mobile, either your ad types are less likely to be clicked or less-likely to be served up at all based on your site's layout and mobile-friendliness?

Mind sharing link to your website?

commercialinvoiceform.org, as an example.

Thanks!!!

Incredible how many people have been stuffed by Google.

Amazing how this company can maintain its reputation behaving like this.

Building a business solely relying on someone else's walled garden (Google Adsense in this case) is a business risk.

You need to find other paths of revenue, ideally out of Google.

There is no other way, at least in advertising. Google is monopoly. You can make some extra by charging directly but it's not for every business.

I see so many people screwed over by Google. Are there any Adsense alternatives that have human support, not too high traffic requirements and just don’t suck overall?

Media.net, taboola, infolinks, just to name a few...

0 $/month since they banned my account automatically when it reached the minimum quantity to retrieve the money.

I think adsense earnings dropped since oct 2018 or something, and it often refuses to fill up impressions.

Also what kinds of ad units do you use? I m testing auto ads now and seeing a drop in earnings (which is typical for most of google's automated recommendations for me).

What alternatives to adsense monetization are viable nowadays?

Auto ads, i am also looking for an alternative.

For years I did, but the growth of mobile traffic has made it a lot more difficult.

Website?

Yes, a variety of websites. Won't list them here though.

Any good alternatives?

Ads.net, revcontent, adcash

If you can meet the minimum traffic numbers, Exponential is an option. Higher quality ads than AdSense, but the fill rate isn't always as high as one might like.

Demanding min traffic and not being able to fill the slots is a red flag.

It's more of an inconvenience, since you can specify a fallback.

US-based, and they've never missed a payment in 16 years. That's pretty good considering how most ad networks come and go these days.

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21397274. TLDR; CodeFund sounds interesting. There's also AdThrive, MediaVine, Media.net

I'm sure Google does.

Dropping like crazy, hard to know when to pull the plug.

What did anyone do with thier domain names from failed adsense sites?

Typical storyline: Google "banned publisher, kept the money and refuse to communicate".

Of course these bans usually happens at the end of the revenue cycle where accumulated funds are at their max.

No, some third party maliciously clicked on some ads and a purchased asset had some prohibited/adult user submitted content that together wound up getting me a lifetime ban.

Good,Good,Good

I had 25$ per month and in September or August dropped to 7$ Not a big deal but still

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