AdSense mystery

So I'm having an AdSense mystery with my work sites and I wanted a large space to lay it all out and hopefully get some ideas/pointers on what I'm doing wrong from anyone in the AdSense community.

We have a site for our industry publication, QSR magazine with a mobile version/theme. The first half of this year, I simply had an AdSense spot at the top of our page and it was clipping right along with pretty decent AdSense revenue. In trying to quantify that, I'm confused with AdSense reports with two different products: AdSense for Content and AdSense for Mobile Content. If I just look at July, though, I just see AdSense for Content for our mobile site, so let's just isolate that:

• 39,426 page views, 162 clicks, $120.47 earned

Ok, so my bright idea was: Hey, this is based on one banner ad. What if we update our mobile site to have 4 leaderboards on each page? We could multiple our revenue! I also wanted to consolidate our banner management with our other system (DFP), so I updated our site templates to use the new DFP ad code and created the 4 slots in DFP. This would also allow our advertisers to advertise directly on our mobile site, too.

But what I'm seeing is a dramatic reduction in CPC. We have yet to have direct advertisers, so all impressions are being delivered through AdSense in DoubleClick, but the (revenue) numbers aren't what I was hoping. We made the switch on August 31st, so if I compared November to those July #'s, here's what I'm seeing:

• Mobile Leaderboard #1: 25,794 impressions, 122 clicks, $20.37 earned
• Mobile Leaderboard #2: 24,826 impressiosn, 92 clicks, $11.22 earned
• Mobile Leaderboard #3: 20,714 impressions, 56 clicks, $4.37 earned
• Mobile Leaderboard #4: 22,671 impressions, 9 clicks, $0.58 earned

So my question is why am I seeing such a huge reduction when using DFP vs. AdSense directly?

Developing on the Chromebook

I love the concept of the Chromebook/ChromeOS and I think its concept is at the right place and right time. The internet seems omnipresent and having your stuff in the cloud makes it convenient and available to you whenever and wherever you are with any device. Having your stuff in a centralized place also makes sharing & collaboration so much easier. I can only imagine how much brainpower (& Schrödinger cats) it took for Google to nail this with Google Docs.

That said, it is still ahead of its time when it comes to my work, though it really doesn't need to be. My job is mostly web (Drupal, PHP and Perl) development and I primarily use 3 applications on the front-end (Eclipse, Terminal and Chrome) and 2 applications on the back-end (MySQL and Apache [with Perl & PHP support]). Nothing really CPU-intensive and in my opinion, it's a perfect fit for the ChromeOS environment. I thought I'd share my thoughts on how it could work...

Chrome

First, the easy one: Chrome. Check. It would be cool to have some way to test webpage rendering with other browser engines so we can do cross-browser testing on one machine, but that's probably a pipe-dream.

Eclipse

This is also an easy one, as there are multiple cloud-based IDE solutions out there. Cloud9 and ShiftEdit come to mind. Here are some must-have features as I see them:

• Offline support: If I'm offline, I should still be able to open & edit my code. When I'm back online, my changes should sync up with the cloud. I don't think it's necessary to merge my changes with any cloud changes, as I'm usually working on my own repository branch anyway.
• Git support: Yes, there are other repository systems, but Git is awesome and dare I say, the most popular one? This can also handle the dirty work of merging my changes with the rest of the team. Being able to hook up to multiple Git repositories, including SSH ones with keys, would be great.
• Customizable language-specific options, such as syntactical color coding and formatting.

Terminal

I use Terminal mostly to look at error logs and open a MySQL console. This functionality could be incorporated into the interface for a backend system.

Backend System

This is (what we call in the South) a big'un (big one, for the rest of y'all ;)). One of the nice workflows that I have is when I make a change in my code, I save and then go to my browser to refresh. All of this is done locally so when I break something, it doesn't affect anyone else. So what I envision is some sort of app that has lots of knobs & dials to configure a local database and web server instance. Or it could be made simpler by creating a virtual machine instance and having a console window where the developer can do the configuration stuff manually. It could mount the filesystem that the code editor is using to run the code.

If someone nailed this, it would open ChromeOS as a web development platform, which would not only open the doors to millions of web developers, but allow for more people to become web developers, building a better Web. :)

NOTE: This is all high-level and I'm probably missing a few details ... feel free to comment below with your thoughts and suggestions.