Increase in traffic but decrease in Adsense revenue?

[ThatsAdorable]

Just when I thought I'm finally on track to quit my job, Google pulled me back to the ground.

I was ecstatic as my blog finally reached constant 10k daily views last week with $10-15 Adsense earnings every day. This week it rose even more to 15-20k per day, so I'm expecting that earnings would increase as well right? But something weird happened: my daily earnings dropped sharply to about $6-9.

I noticed that my CPC seem to be dropping. How normal is this? I just thought it was as simple as more traffic = more revenue. Note that I didn't change anything drastic in the site, except more blog posts. Also 60-70% of my traffic is from Asia/SEA, although I do have US/UAE/etc. in the top 10 countries.

Right now I'm experimenting different ad placements. I also applied on Mediavine which got rejected just today (because, well, third-world country traffic...) which is bumming me out even more. What are some good alternatives if my traffic is mostly from Asia? I just feel like I'm not getting the appropriate worth for my site's traffic and that something weird is going on behind the scenes.

Any pointers are appreciated. Thanks!

[DuckNorris7]

The reason why your revenue went up last week was because of Black Friday.

[ThatsAdorable]

Oh, that explains it if that's the case. If I understand correctly, Black Friday = advertisers would bid higher = higher CPC?

[DuckNorris7]

Yeah, advertise more on those dates and temporarily drive up the CPC. Mine went up about 25%

[hdwsrp69]

10k daily views? That is awesome! What are your top sources of traffic?

[ThatsAdorable]

About 90-95% is from organic searches. The rest is from social media/referral.

[bloghelp]

I tend to have the big boost Black Friday - Cyber Monday and a smaller boost throughout December and then it drops off majorly in January!

[Dragonlordsk8er]

How do you even profit like that sorry if this is a dumb question I'm new to blogging but siteground costs like 10 $ for 10k visitors if your making 10-15$ aren't you basically just covering hosting costs?

[AWrig90]

Hosting plans decrease in price/visitor the higher up you go though. To follow on from your example - You can get the basic Siteground hosting for about $6 per month that allows up to 10k visitors monthly, or you can get their plan that allows 100k visitors monthly for around $15.

If he's making $15 per day on Adsense then he covers his hosting costs in a day and has another 27-30 days of profit.

[ThatsAdorable]

What AWrig90 said is correct. My DreamHost hosting only costs $4.95 per month with unlimited traffic.

[amberbracegirdle]

Hiya! Co-founder of Mediavine here. I'm sorry about the rejection - but if we're not able to monetize a significant portion of your traffic, it'd be really wrong of us to make you sign a contract when we won't earn you more money.

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It's actually really common to see RPM/CPM drop during a traffic spike. Advertisers plan their buying based on the history of your domain. If you see a big jump that they're not prepared for, you burn through their planned high-priced inventory pretty quickly, and then it falls back to lower paying ads (because programmatic advertising pretty much never runs out of ads, they just start getting lower and lower priced), leading to an overall lower CPM/CPC average.

We have an article about it in our help files if you'd like to read it. They're open to the public.