I have to say that I'm starting to become somewhat alarmed at the deterioration of ad revenue this spring. Granted, when you're "only" in the ~10 million annual page view business, your overall sample is still relatively small for identifying trends, but given essentially the same traffic, you kind of expect to have the same revenue.
I've never 100% expected my little side business to be even remotely my primary source of income (though I suppose it was, by default, during my non-employment runs), but I do want it to maintain a certain level for a number of reasons. The obvious thing is that I want it to enable is reinvestment. Keeping up on software is expensive. Keeping up on hardware is expensive. Monthly expenses aren't terrible, but a few hundred bucks is still not something I want to spend out of pocket.
Ten years ago I decided to augment ad dollars with subscription revenue, and to this day, that still does generate a good chunk of cash. But it's not something I can rely on unless suddenly six times as many people sign-up. Knowing this, what do I do? Endeavor to build more ad supported sites. Duh.
I really need to shift focus to actual products. I have an idea for one that I'm building on now, from time to time, because it's something I need as a side effort to some existing stuff. If that works as expected, then I'll "productize" it for the world at large. That would be an interesting exercise.
Hopefully things will pick up next month, because that's when traffic picks up in a big way, especially on PointBuzz, after Cedar Point opens. It's just that I'd rather "know" this sort of thing, instead of "hope."
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