cpcs

As you have also stated elsewhere, CPCs going down is hard to understand without a distribution of CPCs bucketed by traffic.

Dropping CPCs are pretty obviously a result of the mix shifting to mobile (particularly since both mobile and desktop CPCs are rising).

Aren't you conflating two things: display ads cpcs vs adwords cpcs?

It makes sense to me that CPCs for a lot of topics would increase leading up to Christmas.

Online, the Times is competing against Google and Facebook CPCs and there's no way to get a high enough value/volume to make up for the lost print revenue.

But if you reduce your CPCs down to your breakeven, the volume will be too low to bother.

How do you know that CPCs are falling because of existing advertisers paying less vs.

Beyond that though is the notion that while CPCs may come down, Google has been pushing hard on the retargeting front.

Until there's a clear path to buy something, CPCs on mobile screens are going to be worth fractions of their Web counterparts.

To give you a context on how wrong you are, typical CPCs on banner/interstitial ad clicks on mobile apps is around $0.02-$0.05.

Desktop CPCs rose for a long time until they established that for many verticals.

It was even better when mobile was newer and CPCs were far lower..

The volume of searches for stuff like "family website" was abysmal and the CPCs for stuff like "family photos" was out of the water.