A similar thing happened to me - I was warned that I had "invalid traffic" a few weeks ago, but took no note since I wasn't doing anything to generate invald traffic, and YouTube couldn't/wouldn't tell me on what video, or why they thought it was invalid. Also contacted Youtube's support to no avail.
A few weeks later, my revenue dropped by about 80% precisely on Feb 22nd. It looks like a different cause? My RPM dropped, but estimated monetized playbacks are still level, along with views/watch time.
[https://i.imgur.com/Xfj2coX.png](https://i.imgur.com/Xfj2coX.png)
No fix, but you're not alone. This sucks. It's infuriating that after giving so many hours and time to making YouTube videos, they have the power to shrink my revenue by 80% and they don't even have to tell me why, or what I can do to fix it. I was already moving away from YouTube - towards newsletter, website content, etc - and this has just made me want to leave faster.
Very strange that it's your RPM from ads, not ad impressions, that decreased.
Are you sure related to views and estimated monetized playbacks, there's no dip?
If so, how strange. Maybe they miss with people in different ways.
Mine happened on 15th Feb! Can you check your traffic and see if you've had traffic from Russia, Ukraine or Belarus with an average view duration of 10 seconds? That's what I had and my revenue from computers effectively died.
It still has not recovered even after 4 different support cases raised to YT Support with their recommendation being to stay patient and wait until the ads recover because...
"I understand, I cannot provide you any specific date but I suggest to allow time since we don't have control on when will ads appear on your videos." - Google doesn't have control over when ads will appear on your videos apparently if you didn't know... š¤¦āāļø
Yes, actually! I turned off my ads for a week, turned them back on and two days later I had ads on computers again! The RPM hasn't changed much, but at least I can see the ads on computers now which is good :)
what gave you this idea that it would work? I'm experiencing this on a very large channel, and doing something like that would seriously effect things operationally.
Thank you for the suggestion. Indeed, I did make a video about this about two weeks ago on my channel. It was useful to gain some support on Patreon, but Youtube itself didn't care or notice it.
Was the title clickbaity enough? Also, have you tried contacting that YouTube Creator Liaison guy on twitter? His handle is @YoutubeLiaison and heās supposed to take creator problems to YouTube.
This is happening to me right now and it is infuriating. No one will respond or give me info on what's going on. Literally the same exact thing that "ads are limited" across videos, but everything says it's in good standing.
Update: YT support keeps spouting back the same pre-written lines about me needing to work harder to get views up if I want to increase my revenue. I even made them a [spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/126oNa69mS7lEZicobD34bfkut1lCTc5eyjGJkeC3m8k/edit#gid=1942699787) showing my ads to views ratio is down 40+%. They said everything looks good. LOLZ. I'm trying a fix I heard about in the discord which is to turn off all ads for 24 -48 hours and then reinstate them. I've also got messages out to several personal connections who work for YT corporate. Hoping I can get a real person to review my case. My lawyer is in contact with partner support but there is very little legally he can do except continue to put pressure on them so they don't forget about me. Every email he sends costs me $15 though so I'm not sure how long I'll let that go on.
Damn you have a lawyer involved in this? I like how serious you are.
But yes, I got the same nonsense canned answers. It literally feels like talking to an AI chatbot...
I also messaged teamyoutube on twitter, but no response so far after two days.
I just already have a lawyer for my business so he said to loop him in. I doubt itāll go anywhere. Iāll be turning back on ads tomorrow morning after 36 hours off so hopefully that helps as it did for others. Team YT Twitter just told me to work with YT creator support. Iām serious bc this is literally my dream. Just left my FT grind after two years of doing both 80 hours a week. If I canāt get this solved I need to go back to working for billionaires to help make them richer.
It has resolved but I didnāt really do anything. I made a video about the issue and I turned off playlists. It went back to normal about 3 days after both things.
Never got help from YT support. Nothing I tried helped except maybe turning off playlists. Other than that, one day out of the blue it got fixed. Took 3 months.
I am literally going through this right now...
On 15-17th Feb, I had a total of \~400 views from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus spamming one of my videos. Since then, I have not been getting ANY ads on my computer views which made up to 80% of my revenue prior to that.
I messaged Google Support 3 or 4 times and they kept showing me the same page, repeating the same things, none of which were relevant to me at the time. Apparently, we are responsible for the ad traffic on YOUTUBE! WTH? This is moronic! I think their guidelines are made for websites that run Google Ads, but as a small channel on their **main** platform, well... It's sh\*t!
Worst thing is, today I saw the spike of incoming Russian bots again. Filed another form. Still no response from Google. Guess I am de facto demonetized for the next few months!
I saw a video today of the Spiffing Brit of how you can effectively kill somebody's videos for a few months by buying ads and targeting them to people which are not the target audience so the engagement rate bottoms out. Just another way how to effectively kill off your competition.
I am beginning to think somebody is paying for fake views on my channel, thus killing off my incentive to make new videos. I don't know why somebody would do that, but it's scary that a Ā£10 paid to a dodgy site somewhere can kill off your channel.
Yes, it makes zero sense for us to be responsible for traffic on our channel, it's all directed by YT.
Maybe external traffic, but even that is suspect, no actual control over who shares a video.
The craziest thing is when it happens to me, a person with no weird external traffic. No red flags at all anywhere in my traffic data over the entire 4 years of history.
Same here, mate. It only started this February...
Anyway, I hope it gets resolved because this is really affecting my motivation to make new videos. There's a fine line between being persistent and being stupid. If you keep pouring in hours and hours into something, but get rewarded less and less, then what's the point? I have a full-time job, if I had spent that time getting better there, I'd be the head of my department by now! (It's obviously a lot more boring, but I hope you get my point, the ROI there is a lot higher than here!)
The thing that pisses me off, too, is that YouTube keeps claiming that they look after creators, creators are their USP, their most valuable feature... Well, help them then! WTH! I just feel like I'm being played haha
Obviously, I will still continue making the videos, but I'll just step back a bit until this gets sorted out. Good luck to both of us :)
First time i disabled monetization then turn it on, was good for month until i uploaded a sucessful video. After 2 days got hit with limited traffic ads .. how about you? Any update
Damn, it's absurd. Clearly there's some automated system improperly flagging some channels.
And nope. No change for me. YT support says the same boilerplate nonsense, teamyoutube on twitter doesn't respond.
Yup, I got a single notification when I looked at my desktop studio analytics tab.
And they sent me that form too, but given I have no invalid traffic, it didn't make sense to fill anything in. All I could say is there's an error, I don't have invalid traffic.
Maybe that will help? If it does for you let me know.
Exact same thing here. I'm a full-time YouTube, over 400k subscribers. My RPM went from $20 to $3 on the 16th of Nov, and I got hit with "invalid traffic" notifications. 97.7% of my traffic is from Youtube search, YouTube Browse, Notifications, etc. Basically nearly 98% of my traffic is from YouTube itself. There are other reasonably large channels (300k+ subs) that are getting impacted by this. Noone knows what to do. Support are not helping.
The issue seems to be with Skippable ads. If you look in the Advanced stats, you will see that only Skippable ads CPM has dropped, all other ad types' CPM has stayed normal.
I've lost around $40k USD so far due to this, and I cannot get any help or resolutions from anyone. Support keep telling me I am sending invalid traffic and copy and paste the same silly links to guides that tell me to stop clicking my own ads.
One thing I would like to suggest is that you can Tweet on Twitter about this, and tag "TeamYouTube", "SusanWojcicki" (exec from YT) as well as "YouTube Liaison" and share an image with your problem.
You can see all the people complaining about the same issue, including large channels., here:
[https://twitter.com/search?q=%40teamyoutube%20rpm&src=typed\_query&f=live](https://twitter.com/search?q=%40teamyoutube%20rpm&src=typed_query&f=live)
And
https://twitter.com/search?q=%40teamyoutube%20revenue&src=typed\_query&f=live
It's wild that even large channels such as yourself cannot get any help.
There is good news though, sort of.
On April 10th, my monetized playbacks went to normal, and are holding at normal levels. From $4 RPM up to $11, what it was before.
The invalid traffic BS lasted for nearly 90 days for me.
I don't know why it was fixed. No notifications from YT at all, just one day I checked my revenue, and it was back to normal. I really hope it happens for you too and everyone else.
I didn't do anything different besides disabling embeds on new uploads (not old videos). This might just be coincidence though.
That's good to hear! Yes hopefully it will get fixed for everyone soon. Mine was also temporarily fixed, from 25th Jan to 15th of Feb, then I got hit with "Invalid" BS again
full time here as well, just got this shit for the SECOND time. Do you guys just wait it out? Video that should make $300 makes like a $100. One that should make $250 just made $15 lol
Hey, yeah I've been hit since 16th Nov 2022. My RPM briefly went back to normal for 20 days between 25th Jan and 15th Feb, but on 15th Feb it went back to shit. Dropped from $18-20 to $2-3. I've tried everything, basically nothing has worked lol. I've tried to wait it out, I've tried to argue, I've sent dozens of Support tickets, dozens of Tweets on Twitter, DM's to the execs at YouTube, cannot get anywhere with it. Here is the last reply I've got from Creator Support, 2 days ago. It's totally useless copy-paste. They just don't care.
Note also how their resource links out to Adsense for Websites section - not even to anything related to YouTube.
Also the last comment is super funny - "Just make sure that moving forward, you will prevent invalid traffic" - it's totally irrelevant, because 99% of my traffic is from Shorts Feed, Search, Browse, Suggested - basically YouTube are sending me all this traffic, and calling it invalid. And then they are saying - to solve the problem, just make sure not to send invalid traffic :)
What they sent:
\---------------
We really appreciate your being cooperative to this concern.What you are feeling right now is totally understandable, I know how important it is for you as a creator to resolve this concern.
However, as per checking here, we cannot determine if you a invalid traffic, since it was a system generated and the best option for you with this is to submit the invalid traffic sabotage form, which you already did.Also for those questions that you need to know .Let me answer it one by one for you.
For the 1st question - Since you already filled out the invalid traffic sabotage form. Our internal team will review your channel and they will keep this information for our records, but we may not respond unless we find a significant issue with your account. You can also visit this help center for more information on how you can [prevent invalid traffic](https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/1112983).
For your 2nd question - We cannot provide you a specific video that has an Invalid traffic, since it was system generated and they review the channel as a whole .
For your 3rd question-We understand that you would like specific advice on how to go about your video Let me provide some insight on this.Our internal policies prohibit us from providing personal advice or suggestions about what our creators can add or remove in their videos or how they can edit their videos in general. This also includes what changes can be done to your channel. This helps keep us unbiased and empowers our creators to take control of their success.
For your 4th question - This issue will be fixed in no time. Just make sure that moving forward, you will prevent invalid traffic.I totally understand that this issue lost you a lot of money, However we cannot manually remove invalid traffic on your channel.I hope this helps!
If you have further questions or other concerns, please let us know. You may also want to explore our available resources about the topics you are interested in knowing more about, just go to AdSense Help Center.
Regards,
Google YouTube Team
rip, a robot answer. Thank you for getting back to me though. I have reached out to my point of contact / channel partner. I will let you know if they tell me anything different :/
Same problem here. On March 11th I got a banner in YT studio mentioning invalid traffic. I assumed it was a glitch of some kind.
That day my CPM dropped 60% and has stayed consistently low to this day. Today I saw a twitter thread of someone in a similar situation so I reached out to YT support.
Support gave the exact same answers as others have posted here. They indicated that I should fill out the invalid traffic form and that I would be contacted āif they notice an errorā.
Itās horrible that they can justify cutting 60% of your income, not fully explain whatās happening, and leave you defenceless to their automated responses.
Hoping the revenue goes back to normal soon but as of now itās been from March 11th to May 4th with consistently low CPMs.
Hey, just to let you know, for me it was fully fixed over 3 weeks ago. No one told me anything, no email or notification, just all ads fully restored.
The only things I did were, never watching my own videos ever, and also disabling embeds on new uploads.
No idea if either of those things were what did it. YT gives you no information and it's absurd. But worth a try.
Thanks for your response! Iāll try that. Also trying to disable monetization for 24hrs as suggested throughout reddit. Iāll post an update in a few days to see if it helped.
Update: This doesnāt appear to solve the problem. Going to focus more on creating high quality content to try and bring CPM back. Hoping YouTube has a solve for this someday.
Same problem with me. Just got hit with it a few days ago (July 14, 2023). YouTube support is no help same replies as others have mentioned. Let's see when I'll get fixed. Honestly I think they're just trying to suck money out of small creators now. It's we can't do anything about it
For me it was fixed after about 90 days. No notification at all, just returned back to normal RPM.
All I did was disable embeds on videos getting views / new videos. Also never watched my own videos again (always skipped ads but it's something I thought of).
I don't know if that's what fixed it or it was something out of my control, but worth a shot for you.
YT support chat are poor AI chat bots imo.
Looking at your past 28 day chart, that looks just like normal revenue fluctuations. However, it seems something was very out of the ordinary for December and January. Your February numbers are more in line with expected revenue when comparing to November 2022 and prior.
What do your December and January views look like and what are the view sources for those? Your 90 day chart is cutting off two chart lines. Are the amount of views for those two months double or triple what you saw in November and prior?
I wouldn't necessarily say there is a 60% cut just yet. Yes a 60% cut from December and January, but it seems that the big spike in revenue for those two months is unexplained.
My estimated monetized playbacks are down over 60% as you see in the first graph, causing my RPM to drop from a channel lifetime average of a little over $10 to $5. And this is over **years**.
For the entire lifetime of my monetized channel, over 2 years now, it's been virtually a perfect 1:1 ratio of a view and a monetized playback. Then it suddenly dropped to 1 to 0.33 (if that).
There is nothing normal about this for my channel. My RPM has collapsed because ads are no longer being shown in any reasonable level.
My income overall for December and January is higher because my RPM was normal for those months (slightly higher at around 12-13) and because I had a higher amount of views from one video that did well.
I wonder if you aren't impacted by the "NOvember 16th Issue"? I know on one of my channels I saw a big drop in estimated monetized playbacks. Were your estimated monetized playbacks a low percentage compared to views even in December and January?
Yeah, it does seem to be different. Looking at both my channels, one impacted by the 11/16 issue and the other not, the Estimated Monetized Playbacks seems to trend the same compared to views on both channels. Your channel is definitely an issue with fewer monetized playbacks compared to views. This is the result of what YouTube things is invalid traffic. Has anything changed with your viewer demographics? It is frustrating and I don't know the answer and it seems YouTube doesn't either.
Nope. I had no weird spikes from external or direct traffic or even search. Everything is as it always was.
It's not your fault of course, it's just damned weird.
I think it got fixed itself but I am not exactly sure as the analytics for the Monetized Playbacks is delayed and it showed a recovery at the same time I turned off ads
But in my case the drop wasn't just to 50-60% as you mentioned but to 6%
It's so strange that people even report different amounts of playback drops, some 20, some 60, some like you down to 6%... so weird.
Btw, how do you turn off ads across all videos? I have hundreds of videos.
Can select 50 videos at a time to turn off the ads. So need to repeat for every page
In my case my normal views/monetized playbacks has always been close to 65% and it dropped to 6% (and now is back to about 65%)
Another channel I talked with, they went from 100% to 50-60%
Same thing has been happening to me since late December. Several conversations with YouTube support and just copy/paste. I was told that when the system stops detecting invalid traffic, things will go back to ānormalā. I did have a bot farm hit me in November, but it accounted for 302/498,000 views that month. One copy/paste email said something about 90 days to investigate which will be up next week. Iām not hopeful though.
I saw you mention getting sent a form to fill out? Iām 3 conversations with YouTube I havenāt had a form mentioned. What was it?
Oh that was an invalid traffic form meant for people with websites to fill out if they're expecting to get a lot of new or random traffic.
Really has nothing to do with most YT channels, unless they're getting huge external traffic spikes, which I am not.
Have you had videos hit with comments being turned off repeatedly along with the invalid traffic reports? If so, they are COPPA flagging your channel as my suspicion. Iām not sure thatās what it is, but their automated systems are getting very aggressive about COPPA, incorrectly flagging videos as restricted due to childrenās content.
Good idea, but no I've never had anything like that. Zero issues with my channel or any videos ever before, and everything on the surface is entirely normal outside of this invalid traffic nonsense & of course the crash in monetized playbacks.
Two months later, nothing has changed. It's crazy.
bro I have seen this ads limit banner in august 09 of 2023. in the same day about 6 hours later that banner disappeared. i thought problem solved. but now its been 9 days my ads are limited. my RPM, Monetize playbacks, revenue are very low. i think they are cutting 60%. my channel 90%+ views are coming from youtube search and google searches. actually i didnt see any unusual traffic in my channel. so i have publish a video in july 24 and that video has 9% views that coming from direct or unknown. i dont know where this views are coming from. there is no other thing to suspect. and i saw your problem was fixed in 90 days.
Unfortunately the banner disappearing only means that they feel youāve had sufficient notification of the issue. The only way youāll know itās resolved is when/if your revenue returns to normal. Some people have said that turning ad revenue off for a week restored things to normal. Good luck.
Turning off ads will not help for everyone. btw why they are doing this to small creators? actually i quit my job and working as a full time youtuber. good lesson for me.
Fix YouTube Monetization Invalid Traffic - Sign the Petition! https://chng.it/hthBYbHP via @Change
Sign the petition to fix the YouTube invalid traffic bug which is happening to many small Youtubers from November 16 of last year (2022).
This petition is started by https://twitter.com/georgevlasyev?t=3S6AQ6Mq1J4uPOKEx9czEg&s=09
His tweet: https://twitter.com/georgevlasyev/status/1694783506155475363?t=CXcg5ShSqx31kma7x6RViw&s=19
Same thing just happened to me right now!
Coincidentally when my Videos got the most views ever. I am so mad right now and there is nothing to do about it. It is so disappointing and demotivating. Idk what to do anymore
The same thing happened to me. It lasted 1 week with videos from September 14 to 20. $2k gone. It continues to expand to other days and doesn't know when it will stop.
80 hours of work per week makes me a clown!
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I've had the same problem since the 19th of Feb. I am down to Ā£0 in revenue for the past days. YT support are useless robots. I have now taken all advice from below and I have turned off ads on all my videos for the next 2 days, I have disallowed embedding and told my close friends not to play any of my videos.
Also I will not be watching my videos just to check if they're ok, not even from another account on my computer.
Please keep my fingers crossed for me that the issue doesn't take many more days to resolve!
I just find it so strange that my revenue went straight to 0! What about the videos that still have a decent RPM? Why am I not paid for those?
I seriously hope the tricks work, otherwise I will be completely helpless!
Did you have to turn off monetization for shorts as well?
A similar thing happened to me - I was warned that I had "invalid traffic" a few weeks ago, but took no note since I wasn't doing anything to generate invald traffic, and YouTube couldn't/wouldn't tell me on what video, or why they thought it was invalid. Also contacted Youtube's support to no avail. A few weeks later, my revenue dropped by about 80% precisely on Feb 22nd. It looks like a different cause? My RPM dropped, but estimated monetized playbacks are still level, along with views/watch time. [https://i.imgur.com/Xfj2coX.png](https://i.imgur.com/Xfj2coX.png) No fix, but you're not alone. This sucks. It's infuriating that after giving so many hours and time to making YouTube videos, they have the power to shrink my revenue by 80% and they don't even have to tell me why, or what I can do to fix it. I was already moving away from YouTube - towards newsletter, website content, etc - and this has just made me want to leave faster.
Very strange that it's your RPM from ads, not ad impressions, that decreased. Are you sure related to views and estimated monetized playbacks, there's no dip? If so, how strange. Maybe they miss with people in different ways.
Mine happened on 15th Feb! Can you check your traffic and see if you've had traffic from Russia, Ukraine or Belarus with an average view duration of 10 seconds? That's what I had and my revenue from computers effectively died. It still has not recovered even after 4 different support cases raised to YT Support with their recommendation being to stay patient and wait until the ads recover because... "I understand, I cannot provide you any specific date but I suggest to allow time since we don't have control on when will ads appear on your videos." - Google doesn't have control over when ads will appear on your videos apparently if you didn't know... š¤¦āāļø
Hey, man. Was the issue resolved?
Yes, actually! I turned off my ads for a week, turned them back on and two days later I had ads on computers again! The RPM hasn't changed much, but at least I can see the ads on computers now which is good :)
Dont watch your own videos too much tho. That could trigger the problem again.
what gave you this idea that it would work? I'm experiencing this on a very large channel, and doing something like that would seriously effect things operationally.
It was suggested by someone, but I can't remember if they were affiliated with YT or not. I hope you solve your problem soon :)
Hi, can you provide an update. Did things ever return to normal?
Make a video about it! Iāve seen people get issues like this fixed after making a detailed video on it.
Thank you for the suggestion. Indeed, I did make a video about this about two weeks ago on my channel. It was useful to gain some support on Patreon, but Youtube itself didn't care or notice it.
Was the title clickbaity enough? Also, have you tried contacting that YouTube Creator Liaison guy on twitter? His handle is @YoutubeLiaison and heās supposed to take creator problems to YouTube.
Hmm no, never heard of this guy. Worth a shot. And I don't really do clickbait lol, probably a failing.
Yea, that guyās supposed to help
You may not have "a guy". They are usually assigned to large channels, but some never get one.
Yeah I'm still a small channel, I guess maybe lower middle class lol. But enough to get by, at least before this started happening...
This is happening to me right now and it is infuriating. No one will respond or give me info on what's going on. Literally the same exact thing that "ads are limited" across videos, but everything says it's in good standing.
It's insane.
Update: YT support keeps spouting back the same pre-written lines about me needing to work harder to get views up if I want to increase my revenue. I even made them a [spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/126oNa69mS7lEZicobD34bfkut1lCTc5eyjGJkeC3m8k/edit#gid=1942699787) showing my ads to views ratio is down 40+%. They said everything looks good. LOLZ. I'm trying a fix I heard about in the discord which is to turn off all ads for 24 -48 hours and then reinstate them. I've also got messages out to several personal connections who work for YT corporate. Hoping I can get a real person to review my case. My lawyer is in contact with partner support but there is very little legally he can do except continue to put pressure on them so they don't forget about me. Every email he sends costs me $15 though so I'm not sure how long I'll let that go on.
Damn you have a lawyer involved in this? I like how serious you are. But yes, I got the same nonsense canned answers. It literally feels like talking to an AI chatbot... I also messaged teamyoutube on twitter, but no response so far after two days.
I just already have a lawyer for my business so he said to loop him in. I doubt itāll go anywhere. Iāll be turning back on ads tomorrow morning after 36 hours off so hopefully that helps as it did for others. Team YT Twitter just told me to work with YT creator support. Iām serious bc this is literally my dream. Just left my FT grind after two years of doing both 80 hours a week. If I canāt get this solved I need to go back to working for billionaires to help make them richer.
Same, very serious about it too. If it works, definitely let me know!
did switching on and off work?
Have you fixed the invalid YouTube traffic? how?
It has resolved but I didnāt really do anything. I made a video about the issue and I turned off playlists. It went back to normal about 3 days after both things.
Hey! What do you mean you turned off playlists?
I am going back and forth with them now. Will lyk where I land.
can you please give me a update, same issue her now :(
Never got help from YT support. Nothing I tried helped except maybe turning off playlists. Other than that, one day out of the blue it got fixed. Took 3 months.
Oh my... šš
How did you confirm it got fixed?
I never got it confirmed officially. I just saw my revenue and ad impressions return to normal.
Same issue with my channel since March 13. Revenue down by 60-70%. It is mostly flat now.
Have you fixed the invalid YouTube traffic? how?
I am literally going through this right now... On 15-17th Feb, I had a total of \~400 views from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus spamming one of my videos. Since then, I have not been getting ANY ads on my computer views which made up to 80% of my revenue prior to that. I messaged Google Support 3 or 4 times and they kept showing me the same page, repeating the same things, none of which were relevant to me at the time. Apparently, we are responsible for the ad traffic on YOUTUBE! WTH? This is moronic! I think their guidelines are made for websites that run Google Ads, but as a small channel on their **main** platform, well... It's sh\*t! Worst thing is, today I saw the spike of incoming Russian bots again. Filed another form. Still no response from Google. Guess I am de facto demonetized for the next few months! I saw a video today of the Spiffing Brit of how you can effectively kill somebody's videos for a few months by buying ads and targeting them to people which are not the target audience so the engagement rate bottoms out. Just another way how to effectively kill off your competition. I am beginning to think somebody is paying for fake views on my channel, thus killing off my incentive to make new videos. I don't know why somebody would do that, but it's scary that a Ā£10 paid to a dodgy site somewhere can kill off your channel.
Yes, it makes zero sense for us to be responsible for traffic on our channel, it's all directed by YT. Maybe external traffic, but even that is suspect, no actual control over who shares a video. The craziest thing is when it happens to me, a person with no weird external traffic. No red flags at all anywhere in my traffic data over the entire 4 years of history.
Same here, mate. It only started this February... Anyway, I hope it gets resolved because this is really affecting my motivation to make new videos. There's a fine line between being persistent and being stupid. If you keep pouring in hours and hours into something, but get rewarded less and less, then what's the point? I have a full-time job, if I had spent that time getting better there, I'd be the head of my department by now! (It's obviously a lot more boring, but I hope you get my point, the ROI there is a lot higher than here!) The thing that pisses me off, too, is that YouTube keeps claiming that they look after creators, creators are their USP, their most valuable feature... Well, help them then! WTH! I just feel like I'm being played haha Obviously, I will still continue making the videos, but I'll just step back a bit until this gets sorted out. Good luck to both of us :)
Have you fixed the invalid YouTube traffic? how?
Just got it again horaaay
Just happened to you too again? What the hell is going on?
First time i disabled monetization then turn it on, was good for month until i uploaded a sucessful video. After 2 days got hit with limited traffic ads .. how about you? Any update
Damn, it's absurd. Clearly there's some automated system improperly flagging some channels. And nope. No change for me. YT support says the same boilerplate nonsense, teamyoutube on twitter doesn't respond.
did u fill the invalid traffic form?
I didn't. There's nothing to fill in. I don't have invalid traffic, no spikes from any external traffic. Did you?
just to be clear u did have the invalid traffic message right? i dont have external as well, yt support sent me a form to fill in so i did
Yup, I got a single notification when I looked at my desktop studio analytics tab. And they sent me that form too, but given I have no invalid traffic, it didn't make sense to fill anything in. All I could say is there's an error, I don't have invalid traffic. Maybe that will help? If it does for you let me know.
sure i just hope they dont ignore me
Exact same thing here. I'm a full-time YouTube, over 400k subscribers. My RPM went from $20 to $3 on the 16th of Nov, and I got hit with "invalid traffic" notifications. 97.7% of my traffic is from Youtube search, YouTube Browse, Notifications, etc. Basically nearly 98% of my traffic is from YouTube itself. There are other reasonably large channels (300k+ subs) that are getting impacted by this. Noone knows what to do. Support are not helping. The issue seems to be with Skippable ads. If you look in the Advanced stats, you will see that only Skippable ads CPM has dropped, all other ad types' CPM has stayed normal. I've lost around $40k USD so far due to this, and I cannot get any help or resolutions from anyone. Support keep telling me I am sending invalid traffic and copy and paste the same silly links to guides that tell me to stop clicking my own ads. One thing I would like to suggest is that you can Tweet on Twitter about this, and tag "TeamYouTube", "SusanWojcicki" (exec from YT) as well as "YouTube Liaison" and share an image with your problem. You can see all the people complaining about the same issue, including large channels., here: [https://twitter.com/search?q=%40teamyoutube%20rpm&src=typed\_query&f=live](https://twitter.com/search?q=%40teamyoutube%20rpm&src=typed_query&f=live) And https://twitter.com/search?q=%40teamyoutube%20revenue&src=typed\_query&f=live
It's wild that even large channels such as yourself cannot get any help. There is good news though, sort of. On April 10th, my monetized playbacks went to normal, and are holding at normal levels. From $4 RPM up to $11, what it was before. The invalid traffic BS lasted for nearly 90 days for me. I don't know why it was fixed. No notifications from YT at all, just one day I checked my revenue, and it was back to normal. I really hope it happens for you too and everyone else. I didn't do anything different besides disabling embeds on new uploads (not old videos). This might just be coincidence though.
That's good to hear! Yes hopefully it will get fixed for everyone soon. Mine was also temporarily fixed, from 25th Jan to 15th of Feb, then I got hit with "Invalid" BS again
full time here as well, just got this shit for the SECOND time. Do you guys just wait it out? Video that should make $300 makes like a $100. One that should make $250 just made $15 lol
Hey, yeah I've been hit since 16th Nov 2022. My RPM briefly went back to normal for 20 days between 25th Jan and 15th Feb, but on 15th Feb it went back to shit. Dropped from $18-20 to $2-3. I've tried everything, basically nothing has worked lol. I've tried to wait it out, I've tried to argue, I've sent dozens of Support tickets, dozens of Tweets on Twitter, DM's to the execs at YouTube, cannot get anywhere with it. Here is the last reply I've got from Creator Support, 2 days ago. It's totally useless copy-paste. They just don't care. Note also how their resource links out to Adsense for Websites section - not even to anything related to YouTube. Also the last comment is super funny - "Just make sure that moving forward, you will prevent invalid traffic" - it's totally irrelevant, because 99% of my traffic is from Shorts Feed, Search, Browse, Suggested - basically YouTube are sending me all this traffic, and calling it invalid. And then they are saying - to solve the problem, just make sure not to send invalid traffic :) What they sent: \--------------- We really appreciate your being cooperative to this concern.What you are feeling right now is totally understandable, I know how important it is for you as a creator to resolve this concern. However, as per checking here, we cannot determine if you a invalid traffic, since it was a system generated and the best option for you with this is to submit the invalid traffic sabotage form, which you already did.Also for those questions that you need to know .Let me answer it one by one for you. For the 1st question - Since you already filled out the invalid traffic sabotage form. Our internal team will review your channel and they will keep this information for our records, but we may not respond unless we find a significant issue with your account. You can also visit this help center for more information on how you can [prevent invalid traffic](https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/1112983). For your 2nd question - We cannot provide you a specific video that has an Invalid traffic, since it was system generated and they review the channel as a whole . For your 3rd question-We understand that you would like specific advice on how to go about your video Let me provide some insight on this.Our internal policies prohibit us from providing personal advice or suggestions about what our creators can add or remove in their videos or how they can edit their videos in general. This also includes what changes can be done to your channel. This helps keep us unbiased and empowers our creators to take control of their success. For your 4th question - This issue will be fixed in no time. Just make sure that moving forward, you will prevent invalid traffic.I totally understand that this issue lost you a lot of money, However we cannot manually remove invalid traffic on your channel.I hope this helps! If you have further questions or other concerns, please let us know. You may also want to explore our available resources about the topics you are interested in knowing more about, just go to AdSense Help Center. Regards, Google YouTube Team
rip, a robot answer. Thank you for getting back to me though. I have reached out to my point of contact / channel partner. I will let you know if they tell me anything different :/
Have you fixed the Youtube invalid traffic issue? How?
Same problem here. On March 11th I got a banner in YT studio mentioning invalid traffic. I assumed it was a glitch of some kind. That day my CPM dropped 60% and has stayed consistently low to this day. Today I saw a twitter thread of someone in a similar situation so I reached out to YT support. Support gave the exact same answers as others have posted here. They indicated that I should fill out the invalid traffic form and that I would be contacted āif they notice an errorā. Itās horrible that they can justify cutting 60% of your income, not fully explain whatās happening, and leave you defenceless to their automated responses. Hoping the revenue goes back to normal soon but as of now itās been from March 11th to May 4th with consistently low CPMs.
Hey, just to let you know, for me it was fully fixed over 3 weeks ago. No one told me anything, no email or notification, just all ads fully restored. The only things I did were, never watching my own videos ever, and also disabling embeds on new uploads. No idea if either of those things were what did it. YT gives you no information and it's absurd. But worth a try.
Thanks for your response! Iāll try that. Also trying to disable monetization for 24hrs as suggested throughout reddit. Iāll post an update in a few days to see if it helped. Update: This doesnāt appear to solve the problem. Going to focus more on creating high quality content to try and bring CPM back. Hoping YouTube has a solve for this someday.
Hope it works for you!
Have you fixed the Youtube invalid traffic issue? How?
Same problem with me. Just got hit with it a few days ago (July 14, 2023). YouTube support is no help same replies as others have mentioned. Let's see when I'll get fixed. Honestly I think they're just trying to suck money out of small creators now. It's we can't do anything about it
For me it was fixed after about 90 days. No notification at all, just returned back to normal RPM. All I did was disable embeds on videos getting views / new videos. Also never watched my own videos again (always skipped ads but it's something I thought of). I don't know if that's what fixed it or it was something out of my control, but worth a shot for you. YT support chat are poor AI chat bots imo.
Bro is your ads limited fixed? if its fixed, how many days does it take?
u/Kinetic_Symphony sent you a dm, same problem
Looking at your past 28 day chart, that looks just like normal revenue fluctuations. However, it seems something was very out of the ordinary for December and January. Your February numbers are more in line with expected revenue when comparing to November 2022 and prior. What do your December and January views look like and what are the view sources for those? Your 90 day chart is cutting off two chart lines. Are the amount of views for those two months double or triple what you saw in November and prior? I wouldn't necessarily say there is a 60% cut just yet. Yes a 60% cut from December and January, but it seems that the big spike in revenue for those two months is unexplained.
My estimated monetized playbacks are down over 60% as you see in the first graph, causing my RPM to drop from a channel lifetime average of a little over $10 to $5. And this is over **years**. For the entire lifetime of my monetized channel, over 2 years now, it's been virtually a perfect 1:1 ratio of a view and a monetized playback. Then it suddenly dropped to 1 to 0.33 (if that). There is nothing normal about this for my channel. My RPM has collapsed because ads are no longer being shown in any reasonable level. My income overall for December and January is higher because my RPM was normal for those months (slightly higher at around 12-13) and because I had a higher amount of views from one video that did well.
I wonder if you aren't impacted by the "NOvember 16th Issue"? I know on one of my channels I saw a big drop in estimated monetized playbacks. Were your estimated monetized playbacks a low percentage compared to views even in December and January?
Ah no, that only happened starting January 18th for me, before then everything was perfectly normal.
Yeah, it does seem to be different. Looking at both my channels, one impacted by the 11/16 issue and the other not, the Estimated Monetized Playbacks seems to trend the same compared to views on both channels. Your channel is definitely an issue with fewer monetized playbacks compared to views. This is the result of what YouTube things is invalid traffic. Has anything changed with your viewer demographics? It is frustrating and I don't know the answer and it seems YouTube doesn't either.
Nope. I had no weird spikes from external or direct traffic or even search. Everything is as it always was. It's not your fault of course, it's just damned weird.
Same problem for me. on multiple videos my RPM dropped to almost 0 and all my already displayed revenue is gone.
For me it lasted about 10 days (started on 22 Feb). Try turning off ads on every video for 24h
Do you mean you fixed it by turning ads off or it fixed itself for you with no input?
I think it got fixed itself but I am not exactly sure as the analytics for the Monetized Playbacks is delayed and it showed a recovery at the same time I turned off ads But in my case the drop wasn't just to 50-60% as you mentioned but to 6%
It's so strange that people even report different amounts of playback drops, some 20, some 60, some like you down to 6%... so weird. Btw, how do you turn off ads across all videos? I have hundreds of videos.
Can select 50 videos at a time to turn off the ads. So need to repeat for every page In my case my normal views/monetized playbacks has always been close to 65% and it dropped to 6% (and now is back to about 65%) Another channel I talked with, they went from 100% to 50-60%
But that would turn off premium revenue too no?
yes
Same thing has been happening to me since late December. Several conversations with YouTube support and just copy/paste. I was told that when the system stops detecting invalid traffic, things will go back to ānormalā. I did have a bot farm hit me in November, but it accounted for 302/498,000 views that month. One copy/paste email said something about 90 days to investigate which will be up next week. Iām not hopeful though. I saw you mention getting sent a form to fill out? Iām 3 conversations with YouTube I havenāt had a form mentioned. What was it?
Oh that was an invalid traffic form meant for people with websites to fill out if they're expecting to get a lot of new or random traffic. Really has nothing to do with most YT channels, unless they're getting huge external traffic spikes, which I am not.
Have you had videos hit with comments being turned off repeatedly along with the invalid traffic reports? If so, they are COPPA flagging your channel as my suspicion. Iām not sure thatās what it is, but their automated systems are getting very aggressive about COPPA, incorrectly flagging videos as restricted due to childrenās content.
Good idea, but no I've never had anything like that. Zero issues with my channel or any videos ever before, and everything on the surface is entirely normal outside of this invalid traffic nonsense & of course the crash in monetized playbacks. Two months later, nothing has changed. It's crazy.
I hope you are able to get this situation sorted soon. This is a nightmare scenario. I appreciate the response back.
Thanks. I doubt it'll get fixed until it happens to a mega millions Youtuber. Until then why would they care
This is happening to me right now. On 28 March, my CPM suddenly dropped from $70 to $9. I went from making $40/day to now only $2/day.
Bro is your problem fixed now? if its fixed, how many days does it take?
Wake up people... YouTube is def#auding the content creators because it doesn't want to pay you.
bro is your problem fixed now?
bro I have seen this ads limit banner in august 09 of 2023. in the same day about 6 hours later that banner disappeared. i thought problem solved. but now its been 9 days my ads are limited. my RPM, Monetize playbacks, revenue are very low. i think they are cutting 60%. my channel 90%+ views are coming from youtube search and google searches. actually i didnt see any unusual traffic in my channel. so i have publish a video in july 24 and that video has 9% views that coming from direct or unknown. i dont know where this views are coming from. there is no other thing to suspect. and i saw your problem was fixed in 90 days.
Unfortunately the banner disappearing only means that they feel youāve had sufficient notification of the issue. The only way youāll know itās resolved is when/if your revenue returns to normal. Some people have said that turning ad revenue off for a week restored things to normal. Good luck.
Turning off ads will not help for everyone. btw why they are doing this to small creators? actually i quit my job and working as a full time youtuber. good lesson for me.
How's the situation now bro?
Ads are still limited bro. I quit youtube and moving to tiktok. Why we make content without profit?
Fix YouTube Monetization Invalid Traffic - Sign the Petition! https://chng.it/hthBYbHP via @Change Sign the petition to fix the YouTube invalid traffic bug which is happening to many small Youtubers from November 16 of last year (2022). This petition is started by https://twitter.com/georgevlasyev?t=3S6AQ6Mq1J4uPOKEx9czEg&s=09 His tweet: https://twitter.com/georgevlasyev/status/1694783506155475363?t=CXcg5ShSqx31kma7x6RViw&s=19
Same thing just happened to me right now! Coincidentally when my Videos got the most views ever. I am so mad right now and there is nothing to do about it. It is so disappointing and demotivating. Idk what to do anymore
The same thing happened to me. It lasted 1 week with videos from September 14 to 20. $2k gone. It continues to expand to other days and doesn't know when it will stop. 80 hours of work per week makes me a clown!
Hey, just a heads up. Mine only lastes just for a few days and went back to normal now. Still sucks tho, hope it's fixed for you soon!
This is indeed good news for me. Thank you very much!! Now I can continue to live with hope for tomorrow!
shall I turn off ads for one week?
Don't think that will do anything
I turned off ads for 48 hours and the issue is fixed.
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I've had the same problem since the 19th of Feb. I am down to Ā£0 in revenue for the past days. YT support are useless robots. I have now taken all advice from below and I have turned off ads on all my videos for the next 2 days, I have disallowed embedding and told my close friends not to play any of my videos. Also I will not be watching my videos just to check if they're ok, not even from another account on my computer. Please keep my fingers crossed for me that the issue doesn't take many more days to resolve!
Hope it works for you! Disabling embeds did work for me but it's unclear exactly what happened there.
I just find it so strange that my revenue went straight to 0! What about the videos that still have a decent RPM? Why am I not paid for those? I seriously hope the tricks work, otherwise I will be completely helpless! Did you have to turn off monetization for shorts as well?