/> Yes, it's a permanent change, but I believe RPM will gradually recover - advertisers still have the same budgets and those budgets are still distributed across the same web sites. It's just a period of turbulence is going on.As of privacy sandbox I'm not very sure if it's already a standard or just still a request for proposal. What may help is implementing a consent management solution (See Menu -> Privacy and Management in the Adsense UI). I personally haven't done it yet. I never wanted to have those annoying cookie banners on my sites, but if the revenue does not recover I'll have to do | artem.v.bogdan | Webmatrices
techwizardrino 5 days ago
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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.

techwizardrino a day ago
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Holy shit, this actually makes sense. The cookie deprecation thing explains the RPM drop - seems like advertisers can't track users across sites anymore, so they're not bidding as high on ad spots.

Just read through that developers google link. Apparently this started affecting 1% of Chrome users from January 4th, and they're planning to roll it out to everyone by Q3 2024? So this isn't just a temporary glitch - it's going to get worse.

My loan situation still sucks, but at least now I understand why this is happening. Guess I need to start looking into these "Privacy Sandbox" alternatives they mention.

Do you know if these alternative APIs will eventually bring RPMs back up, or is this the new normal we have to accept?

artem.v.bogdan a day ago
(current)

Yes, it's a permanent change, but I believe RPM will gradually recover - advertisers still have the same budgets and those budgets are still distributed across the same web sites. It's just a period of turbulence is going on.

As of privacy sandbox I'm not very sure if it's already a standard or just still a request for proposal. What may help is implementing a consent management solution (See Menu -> Privacy and Management in the Adsense UI). I personally haven't done it yet. I never wanted to have those annoying cookie banners on my sites, but if the revenue does not recover I'll have to do