Website Management Needs SCost Controls in Slowing Economy

Smart website management requires a balance of both revenue and expenses to achieve a healthy profit and healthy growth.

When the economy is growing strongly, it is of course much easier to grow revenue as well.

Businesses spend more on advertising, they make more money and they often increase their advertising budgets in response to their growth in revenue.

Websites that rely on advertising for most if not all of their revenue will benefit greatly from this increase in advertising.

They may even be tempted to increase their expenses by using the profits to invest in content, people and technology.

So revenue in a strong economy drives growth and brings the expenses along with it.
When Expenses Lead Revenue
But the opposite is true as well when the economy starts to slow. It is especially true during a recession like the deep downturn in 2008.

When economic and advertising growth begin to moderate, they put pressure on the bottom line for websites.

When those slowing growth trends turn into declines -- especially deep declines -- it becomes time for a much greater focus on strong cost controls.



Website Management Needs SCost Controls in Slowing Economy

Google AdSense Alternatives Often Bring 6 Added Risks

Google’s industry-dominating AdSense product provides online publishers with enough paying ads to fill an entire site.

Some sites use AdSense to fill remnant ad space that hasn’t been sold to direct sales clients. Other sites are entirely filled with AdSense. Still more use the product with AdSense alternatives.

The product provides not only the largest quantity of online ads in the world but often the highest-paying remnant ads. Google gives the publisher 68 percent of the revenue and keeps 32 percent for the selling, marketing and management of the product.

But for some sites, AdSense is not enough. They may have one of three reasons to look for an Adsense alternative:

They violated Google’s terms of service, got caught and were banned from using the product.
They have so much available inventory because AdSense RPMs can’t keep up with the high volume.
They want to replace the lowest-paying AdSense ads with higher-paying ads from another provider.

While some sites find alternatives that compete with AdSense on RPM, others may find that the following risks outweigh any benefit.

Google AdSense Alternatives Often Bring 6 Added Risks