There isn't a single cite in this entire thread to back that claim up outside of the anecdotal examples. The numbers for online ad sales and media revenue are all growing. The fact that the numbers haven't propagated through to Google's results is further proof of that.
Edit: some stats. The IAB report for last quarter shows 6% quarterly growth:
http://www.iab.net/about_the_iab/recent_press_releases/press...
Google ARPU for USA increased 7% last year:
http://www.statista.com/statistics/306570/google-annualized-...
Facebook ARPU is increasing 80% :
http://www.statista.com/statistics/234056/facebooks-average-...
Mobile ad growth up 83%:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/mobile-ad-spending-leaps-but-tra...
So where is this reported decline? It doesn't show up in numbers anywhere. There are profitable and well-run media businesses with both low and premium content in all sectors. I understand the tendency to want to blame this on some meta trend, but it just isn't there and can't be backed up outside of stories and feelings.
"Network paid clicks, which include clicks related to ads served on non-Google properties participating in our AdSense for Search, AdSense for Content, and AdMob businesses, decreased approximately 11% over the fourth quarter of 2013 and decreased approximately 7% over the third quarter of 2014"[1]
"Average cost-per-click, which includes clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of our Network members, decreased approximately 3% over the fourth quarter of 2013 and decreased approximately 3% over the third quarter of 2014."[1]
"Google's Ad-Price Declines Continue for 12th Straight Quarter"[2]
> There isn't a single cite in this entire thread to back that claim up outside of the anecdotal examples.
ChuckMcM cited Google's earnings report in a top-level comment[3] nine hours before you claimed there isn't a single cite.
[1] http://investor.google.com/earnings/2014/Q4_google_earnings....
[2] http://adage.com/article/digital/google-s-ad-rate-declines-c...
AdSense struggles to distinguish between DrDobbs and a 12 year old writing about learning programming on Blogger. It performs when you have purchasing intent based sectors like gadgets, photogaphy, etc. (and a lot of blogs have built around that)
There is also a confusion here where CPM is used to refer to total CPC revenue divided by total pageviews. CPM is a specific display model where advertisers purchase Units of traffic volume and it scales out.
In any case neither DrDobbs nor GigaOM ran CPC ads in any significant volume (likely would only fill unsold display as backfill).
It is telling that somebody from DrDobbs - a display ad business would cite AdSense CPC performance or ad market performance as a reasoning for their failure. To me it just speaks to not understanding what went wrong.
Nobody should expect to take a premium magazine like DrDobbs, split it into online articles and then slap AdSense onto it and then sit back and count the money. That is totally unrealistic. It also doesn't work with just CPM markets either.
Premium brands require humans to sell them and not algorithms. If you don't have the scale to hire a sales team then you need to join a network.
Your analysis is just plain wrong, by the way. Dr. Dobb's was punished for delivering content. Turns out, advertising doesn't work as advertisers hope on people who actually enjoy content. When you deliver actual content at some point in your career, you will discover this to be true as well.