Traffic Spikes from Non-Monetized Regions (China & Russia)

Since October, some publishers have noticed sudden traffic spikes originating from China and Russia. In many cases, this traffic appears to be associated with bots or crawlers rather than real readers.

Even when the traffic is tied to actual users, it’s not traffic that can be monetized. When this non-monetized traffic is included in your reporting, it can cause your RPM to appear lower than it truly is.

🛑 It is important to note that your actual earnings are not affected; only RPM is impacted during these traffic spikes. 🛑

If you’ve seen unexpected RPM drops during certain periods, this may be the reason.

Why does this matter? 

Non-monetized traffic can make RPM look artificially low. In some cases, we’ve seen RPM dips of $2 or more during these spikes. This can make it harder to accurately assess performance—especially when comparing results year over year.

What can you do? 

Talk to your host! The most effective solution is to block this traffic at the hosting level. Your hosting provider should be able to assist with:

• Adding geo-blocking or bot filtering for China and Russia
• Blocking traffic patterns that resemble non-monetizing bot activity
• Setting up alerts for unusual traffic spikes from these regions

We also recommend adding annotations in Google Analytics for impacted date ranges so you have a clear point of reference in the future.

For any historical date ranges where you might have been impacted, you can recalculate RPM using the following method: 

• Total Sessions - Sessions attributed to China or Russia = Corrected Sessions
• (Revenue for that Date Range / Corrected Sessions) *1000 = Adjusted RPM