While there are AdSense alternatives, I would suspect that most of them are used by people who have been kicked out of AdSense [...] for one reason or another. See where I'm headed with this? Google rules as far as payment goes.
I stumbled across this thread while searching and had to reply :-) I'm looking for a different advertising program, not because I've been kicked out, but because my earnings are falling. Maybe they're still higher than with other networks... maybe not.
Here's my calculations for the last 4 months:
EPI EPC EPPv
January 0.001439136 0.259482759 0.000796352
February 0.001312507 0.2325 0.000711951
March 0.001247079 0.1868125 0.000611048
April 0.001043039 0.14557047 0.000610522
NOTE:
EPI = Earnings per impression
EPC = Earnings per click
EPPv = Earnings per page view (taken from my server logs)
OK, so page views have been falling, but so have the earnings per page view. The content of the site hasn't changed over this period, so my only explanation is that Google are paying less.
Are the rest of you seeing this decrease as well? The ads appear on an open source application's site, so it is hard to get targeted ads (most of the Adwords that appear aren't relevant for visitors) because they pick up on related normal-world projects that share the same words... but that's been the same throughout the site's history.
I'd be interested to hear what you think.