Look at this graph:
It has the % difference between the peak number of publishers and the average number of publishers for that year. This number can only be positive.
What the graph tells us is that there is a clear trend towards hunting down inactive and/or irregular publishers. They want you reporting hours every month!
Another thing it could tell us is that they've been using the average numbers to "fudge" the data, they´ve had quite the margin for many years to artificially inflate growth (since that number is based on average to average and not peak to peak). Now they are running out of room to fudge those numbers!
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