When advertising budgets shrink, the CPM and CPC declines.  If you have spent a lot of time and money getting traffic to your website and have high fixed costs ,  your operations will be affected.   If you have diversified  and have low overheads , you can survive.

By the end of this month, I should get payment from at least 15 different companies for very different products and services and I hope to increase it to at least 30 by the end of the year. For an online business, it is very important to know who you can trust and who you cannot. If the other party is not interested in working with you or is not reliable, it is better to look at other options or you will regret it when it is too late.

I was seriously considering working on affiliate programs, but after reading about the cookie stuffing scam, selling space at a fixed rate seems to be the best option. The worst thing you can  do is not try, there are so many money making options I regret not having experimented with earlier.

Cookie stuffing is STEALING! Those here that are defending the practice – if you work hard to make money through affiliate programs you have undoubtedly been a victim of this kind of theft.

Let’s say you do PPC. You PAID to get that visitor to read your ad, you spent time building the landing page and you sent that PPC visitor to the merchant. It’s YOUR sale! Then the visitor leaves. Reads a forum about something totally unrelated, never clicks a link or does anything. Goes back to buy and the cookie stuffer who did NO legitimate work at all – steals your sale. You PAID for that visitor, don’t you feel cheated? You should!

I have often felt my affiliate conversions were not being tracked accurately , seems it is  widespread , as this eBay lawsuit shows . That is why I like to very sure of the kind of company I am dealing with and spend hours researching, before I sign up. If you want to make money online using white hat techniques , flat monthly advertising rates seem a better bet.

Added:  It appears that the amount stolen was approx $1 million a month , this thread  on EPN ( eBay Partners Network) has more information

There seems to be a 50% decline in parking revenue. I had applied to Fabulous a few months , but they had rejected my application, saying that my domains were not of good quality. (most are reg fee domains) .

Since then I have experimented with almost all advertising and monetization alternatives (a large number of my websites are developed), and found some that work. So searching for other options was better for me, revenues are fairly stable and increasing.

Though dealing directly with end customers is very time consuming, in the long run, it is the most stable revenue source.

Interesting post on CPM rates. I don’t use PPC programs on any on my new websites, I have been experimenting with the various CPM / CPA networks. Rates are low, but at least you get paid some thing for every visitor to your websites.

Compared to the website traffic figures quoted in the above report, my websites are micro and micro micro. But the ad rates I get are 10 to 1000 times higher, since my traffic converts well. Few ad networks (especially those in India , where “good looking” websites are important, not the content of the website) realize this. So till then, one company will continue to dominate internet advertising.