Was the Adsense decline caused by massive AI content?

Key takeaways :

• Adsense revenue decline was drastic in 2023, up to -90%
• This same year 2023, AI content has been massive
• This caused a dilution of advertising impressions and therefore, of the CPM at the same time.

From now on, I am making 50 cents per day with my Adsense, accumulating 1500 to 3000 page views per day. So, I abandoned the very idea of getting paid with Adsense. It’s a complete failure even though it had worked for the last 10 years. The drop in CPMs was drastic and I always suspected a scam on the part of Google, because its advertising turnover was constantly increasing while publishers’ revenues were divided by 10.

And I don’t exclude this explanation, but we could also find another cause with the enormous bag of excrement of AI content which fell on the web in 2023. The decline in revenues started in 2022, but in 2023, this decline has been hellish. You had scammers who published hundreds of thousands of articles in the space of a few months.

So many pages in such a short time has clearly diluted advertising impressions and therefore structurally reduced the CPM. Google’s purge with its March 2024 update could explain an attempt to restore order and we understand this all the more with the ruthless sanctions, because many sites have been purely and simply deindexed.

The case of Facebook with its videos

And we have precedents where GAFAMs have artificially inflated the number of views to defraud advertisers. In 2017, Facebook inflated the views of its videos by a factor of 10 or 20.

Advertisers were paying based on these fraudulent metrics, but they weren’t getting any ROI at all. Facebook got away with paying a paltry $40 million, but its fraud contributed to lower video CPMs globally to this day.

Until we have access to algorithms and the advertising ecosystem from the inside, publishers and advertisers will always be ripped off.