Adsense: Is Google stealing from publishers?

I previously made 5 to 7 dollars per day with my site which has around 5000 views per day and today, I am less than 1 euro! The worst is that when I check my income during the day, I sometimes have peaks of 3 or 4 dollars at midday, but the next day, I am back down to 1 euro!

These kinds of testimonies abound on the Adsense and webmaster forums. Since January 2023, Adsense revenues have fallen by 80 to 90%, even if this decline began at the end of 2022. And so, we are looking for all the reasons for this decline. Many believe that the recession is the cause, but in the first half of 2023, Google published the turnover of its advertising revenues and they had not changed much since 2022! So, how can its revenues be stable when the publishers have lost 90% of the money.

For years, there have always been rumors circulating that Google is cheating with Adsense revenues. We had this leaked publication where Adsense officials had met to reduce publishers’ revenues, because it was causing losses for the company. Honestly, the way the memo was leaked and its tone suggests that it was a fake from a publisher who had been scammed. But the problem is that the mentality is there.

Because subsequently, we had real revelations of how Google was ripping off advertisers by placing video advertisements on low-end sites. But in the case that currently interests us, it is the invalid clicks that are the cause of why your income of 5 dollars at midday becomes 1 dollar at the end of the day.

Previously, invalid or fraudulent clicks were subject to account suspension. Today, Google will calculate these invalid clicks according to certain criteria, for example, a click on an ad, but it immediately records that the user leaves the page, indicating that he made an accidental click. Or clicks by bots, etc. And it will deduct them from your income.

Adsense displays these invalid clicks and the amount lost at the end of each month. But the publishers manually calculated the clicks on their account at a certain time of day and then compared the difference. That’s where they saw that if a site received 10 clicks at midday, then it became 3 or 4 clicks by the end of the day. Since it is the click that brings in money and not the RPM on Adsense, we can understand the loss of 80% of income in the long term.

The big scam is this, these invalid clicks are normally in the minority and if you earn for example 100 dollars per month, then you will have invalid clicks of 2 to 4 dollars at most. People don’t click on ads like fools. If we lose 50 to 70 dollars per month, then this means that Google is cutting the money by claiming fraudulent clicks, but it might not pass it on to advertisers, either through reimbursement or by displaying more ads. He can pocket the difference, because for me, it is the only explanation of why Google’s advertising turnover has not changed because it is the publishers who compensate for the loss.

I can also understand the recession and the usual blabbering, but that doesn’t justify such a loss. And above all, we have lousy income whatever the time of year. Adsense is seasonal, the best months start from October to December, then from May to June. Today, I’ve still been earning my 70 cents or my beautiful dollar for months and it’s just shit.