I dropped Adsense

I feel your pain. One of my pet peeves for years has been Google's failure to run relevant ads on some of my sites. I finally gave up and just accepted that G didn't really care. They just run the ads that they want to run - regardless if the ad will help them or me with more clicks.

I believe that with AdSense, you can choose between having so called topic relevant ads run on your web sites or having ads that match the viewers search history run. Which way did you have your ad selection set?

Are you going to use any other ad system to replace AdSense?

The CTR drops cause the impressions increase but when no one clicks on it the true conversion (adword costs vs revenue from visitor) stays the same.

Maybe Google likes to show them a ton load of impressions in their dashboard.

There is one quirk in your thought.
You will never know what others REALLY get served from adsense.

Testing with an anon like access is the wrong way - nearly 100% of your
visitors are accessing non anon but with their very special google profile.

There is *no* chance that you really get a useful picture about what patterns google server there. Google is dealing with alot signals for serving ads. There is more as just the geo IP.

I worked alot with "test" ads sat home and i saw alot differnt ads there.
Even when accessing with different browsers and other IPs - i worked also with for google not known private proxies.

But when i then go to my friends or family and look at my pages then i am often pretty surprised what kind of ads i see.

There is only one way to determinate the quality of ads - thats split tests.

I suppose they do. Or do they? I can't really tell. I've had a similar experience with a couple of my sites and irrelevant ads. Started a month or so ago and revenue dropped sharply. Every variable has been stable except Google's ad choice.

Some of these huge tech/internet related corporations are interesting. Most are worth billions of dollars so one would assume they know what's going on and are making optimal decisions with regard to their business but then they will do things that make you shake your head.

Do they have such a deep and long term vision that mere mortals such as ourselves can't comprehend what they are doing or are they so lost in their own desperate search for share price maximization that they don't even really know what they are doing? Many a large company has fallen because they get too big and lose focus.

I also think that a lot of these companies were just plain lucky and in the right place at the right time when their growth exploded. Beyond that "luck" phase many have struggled to recreate the same success with other endeavors.

For now I can barely use Google's search results as a user and as a publisher I now can't really use their ads either. And, that is where they make their money. Time will tell I guess.

Yes! Soubhik, I must confess that Google make it policy so ridiculous that they do not approved publishers easily. I have tried lot of time but failed. It is also true that Google disable account without any warning emails. Since Yahoo publisher networks accept only sites with high US, Canada, and Uk Traffic. So I had applied with my blog and after a week I got approved by them. currently I am getting $0.37 to $1 average CPC . I think you should have to tried it out.

Many people dont really understand PPC, many just started as an adsense users because they heard that "Google was paying you for every click", and that has created a lot of problems with Google revenue, their revenue from advertising has not been increased and the advertisers are becoming un happy with this, so what did Google do? he made a change on your PPC configuration in order to push their revenue (artificially) on the last couple of quarters, what they did was to mixed the mobile advertising with the PC advertising, this means that if you dont specifically tell them to separate it, your ads will be shown in mobile and people wont click on them and that your mobile sites will be shown in regular sites where people cant "click to call", in this way they are selling more inventory of their ads space.

Many new advertisers are spending money in bogus advertising, because they are not getting their money back, BUT the advertisers who have more experience are making a killing, because they are paying cents for the mobile traffic if you know how to separate them, not quite sure how long Google will keep this scam going, I think it was an easy way to inflate their quarters revenues, they will change this for sure when their stock price starts plumbing, that will send them the right message... and well done Yukon, they really need to get the message that they are screwing up the things badly.