Hey bloggers, this isn't just another "my earnings dropped" post - I'm genuinely freaking out here.

I run a programming tutorial site that I started in my freshman year. Five years of writing tutorials, building code examples, and helping CS students like myself. It was bringing in around $1.5K consistently, which covered my student loan payments and some living expenses.

Today, I logged in to find my earnings have nosedived to $218. My traffic is exactly the same (about 120K monthly visits), bounce rate unchanged, and I haven't made any changes to the site. The real gut punch? My loan payment of $890 is due next week.

What makes this more confusing:

• No manual actions in Search Console

• No crazy traffic spikes or drops

• All content is original (literally my study notes turned into tutorials)

• Been running ads in the same positions for years

Analytics shows traffic source percentages are identical to last month. RPM went from $12-14 to barely $2. Either I'm missing something obvious, or something's seriously wrong with ad serving.

Anyone else seeing massive RPM drops recently? Really need some insights here because instant noodles aren't going to cover this loan payment.

Edit: Should mention - no AI content, no autogenerated stuff. Just pure, hand-written tutorials and code examples from my actual study experience.

The same for me (although not as drastic)

I assume it can be caused by deprecating 3rd party cookies in Chrome browser (https://developers.google.com/privacy-sandbox/blog/cookie-countdown-2023oct)

They were used to track user's activity on different web sites, thus allowing ad networks to serve behaviour-based ads. Behaviour-based ads are more personalised and way more expensive.

I did expect RPM drop late last year and it started descending in December