Anyone else getting less revenue this month?

[GeekyNet]

Anyone else taking a hit on revenue? I won't quote specific figures here, but my earnings per thousand views has gone down by 40-70% (depending on video) in the past month or so. I just don't understand why.

I haven't seen a drop like this before. I'm wondering if it's something to do with the fiscal year, taxes coming up, and budgeting. I've heard before that January/February sometimes bring in less cash for YouTubers, but a 40%-70% drop is pretty large.

For the longest time I've heard the phrase that a new YouTuber gets around $1.50-$2 (after YouTube's cut) for every thousand views. I talked to a friend on Skype this morning and he said that statement is pretty accurate for him, yet he's only getting around $0.50 - $1 per thousand views now, with $1 per thousand being quite high - for the last month or 2.

So I want to know, which YTTalkers are experiencing revenue cuts? Remember, DO NOT STATE EXACT FIGURES. It is against the TOS of YouTube to share your own personal income from their ad program.

 

[GamersName]

Everyone is experiencing this actually, at least most of us it is a bit weird that you have noticed this only in March. Jan/Feb were worse (should have been).

 

[Rod71]

Besides last Friday and Saturday, this month is rocking along nicely for me.

 

[chottom]

Yes the last few weeks are really bad.
But we had great January so may be this is a kind of equalization process

 

[Stike96]

Worst for me was Jan, it's getting better slowly as the months went on, I did have a really big spike on the Super bowl day though so that contributed a lot.

 

[GeekyNet]

I didn't watch December or January as closely as I did this month, so maybe they were worst. I'll go check.

ACTUAL PAYMENTS - SEE BELOW FOR CPM STATISTICAL DATA
January payments didn't meet the threshold.
February was a 147% increase from January, meaning if I made $10 in January, I made $14.70 in February (just an example).

Looks like this month is estimated to be higher than February.

---
CPM DATA
So statistically, my payouts are getting higher, but views are also getting higher. The actual CPM is 67% lower than what it was plateauing at 1 year ago in February 2014.
To put that in perspective, if earnings were $100 in Feb 2014, they'd be $33 if they had used today's CPM.
That seems like a drastic change...

 

[Riddikore]

You may also be getting more views from people with AdBlock installed. More and more people learning about it everyday.

 

[Fiasco]

Yep. I was worried it was just me. This whole year has been bad especially the last 28 days.

 

[GeekyNet]

You may also be getting more views from people with AdBlock installed. More and more people learning about it everyday.

They should ban AdBlock. It's a plugin that is designed to circumvent advertising, which in YouTube's case is the way creators and even the service itself are partially funded. Using or supporting AdBlock is the same as finding a loophole to avoid paying a fee for a service. It'd be like going to the gym and saying "sorry guys, don't feel like paying this month, thanks for letting me use your treadmill and weights though!"

AdBlock has been around for years, but I don't understand how it's considered legal. One of the kids at school (I'm a paraprofessional at a school for special needs) was running AdBlock while showing me their favorite YouTubers. I kindly explained how it doesn't help them when he skips ads like that, but he didn't care. I was quite annoyed, but let it go.

 

[Tarmack]

They should ban AdBlock. It's a plugin that is designed to circumvent advertising, which in YouTube's case is the way creators and even the service itself are partially funded. Using or supporting AdBlock is the same as finding a loophole to avoid paying a fee for a service. It'd be like going to the gym and saying "sorry guys, don't feel like paying this month, thanks for letting me use your treadmill and weights though!"

AdBlock has been around for years, but I don't understand how it's considered legal. One of the kids at school (I'm a paraprofessional at a school for special needs) was running AdBlock while showing me their favorite YouTubers. I kindly explained how it doesn't help them when he skips ads like that, but he didn't care. I was quite annoyed, but let it go.

Who "They" are you refering to? YouTube and others try their best to circumvent adblockers, but it's the same cat and mouse game that virus producers and antivirus companies engage in. The Adblockers always have the edge. So banning it in a practical sense is ultimately impossible. Well, unless they can "bake" the ad directly into the video file, but the processing needed to do that would be prohibitive.

The legal argument is quite simply that YouTube has no legal right over the users computer. So it the user has software running that intercepts and blocks certain types of content, that's perfectly fine because it is their computer. It's the modern equivalent of muting the TV when a commercial came on.

Frankly, the reason Adblocker exists and is popular is because of unscrupulous abusive advertisers who went out of their way to put their nonsense into everything online in the most obtrusive ignorant way possible. So now, legitimate advertising suffers. Not much can be done about it. YouTube certainly could go down the road of adblocker detection and punishment of the users with it installed, but it would kill YouTube. That kind of ground swell of support for a new competitor that doesn't do those things could well be the shift needed to take away market dominance.

It sucks, but at that end of the day, that's part of why YouTube does so much ad targeting. People are less likely to be personally offended by an ad that is actually interesting to them.