Advertising as a Recession Indicator

I’m sure you’ve all noticed that I have a fair amount of advertising on my blogs.  It’s not really an attempt to make my millions, but is an attempt to cover the costs associated with running and hosting your own sites and email.

In the past I’ve successfully managed to cover my costs, but I’ve noticed over the last few months that I’ve been selling almost nothing, despite site visits remaining relatively stable (and in the case of sapdup growing significantly).

You can see below that while there were some low months previously (where it spikes down to close to 0), the low run over the last few months is unprecedented (I have data going back further which looks similar).

So, given I’m blaming the drop on the recession, could it be that a sign the recession is turning around could be seen in an upturn in my ad revenue?  While my sites are a very small subset, I believe this general hypothesis to be true.  So I’m going to be checking back in the first week of each of the months this year to see whether we’re seeing any ‘green shoots’ coming through my ad revenue.

Note: At the end of June I added a new ad supplier.  This increased revenue by about 11 cents in June and is tracking to increase revenue by about 50 cents in July.  But until we see an economic recovery, no provider is going to be able to meet the revenue figures of >$10 per month which I saw frequently in 2007 and 2008.