All this is very interesting, but the spirit of the subject (at least the beginning of it) was some folks reporting they were earning 10 times LESS ad revenue by switching from one forum software to discourse. And it wasn’t coming back, even after time, and they didn’t manage to solve that issue, to the point where they were thinking about stopping using discourse. Infinite scrolling and the “lack” of pages seems to be believed to be the cause, although I don’t think this has been confirmed in any way.
I got until here that the “problem” seems to be very Google adsense related. Now, I understood that how many ads are requested/displayed may have an importance, and the content of where they are displayed may also have one.
The question quite remains of why these people were able to earn 10 times more with just a different forum software. Maybe they were displaying “too much” ads before. But they were able to. Is it because you can show more ads with different pages than you can with infinite scrolling ? I can’t help but to notice that “clickbait” websites filled with ads make you surf a lot of pages. They are designed this way. They are not using infinite scrolling.
If a user takes time to read a topic and goes through 20 or 30 pages with a “pages” forum software, is it possible that there is no way you can display as many ads with the same amount of “scrolling” with discourse ? (with google adsense, I mean). I see the URL is changing when you scroll in discourse (my first thought was too much ads were maybe displayed on the same URL - But maybe it is still considered the same “page” somehow !?)
Anyway, the base question remains, I believe: Why are some people reporting this “ad revenue drop” with discourse compared to a “page forum” ?