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I want to medium-to-heavy push back on this. Techdirt didn't build a single point of failure into their revenue stream, otherwise the title of this article wou

I want to medium-to-heavy push back on this. Techdirt didn't build a single point of failure into their revenue stream, otherwise the title of this article would be, "Why is Techdirt closing down?". Their support page[0] lists 8 different revenue sources other than Google Ads. And this is precisely the type of diversity that you want. Signing up for 5 different ad networks isn't really good diversity, because: A) your different revenue streams are cannibalizing each other (there's a limit to how many different ad networks you can shove on the same page), so you can't grow your revenue as you diversify, but more importantly, B) many of the factors that affect one ad network (ad blocking, political pressures and privacy laws, fundamental inability to moderate well) will affect all of them. It's not good to have 5 different revenue streams that can all simultaneously be destroyed by the same event. In that scenario you've increased complexity, but you haven't gotten a significant gain in reliability. On the other hand, pulling in money from advertising, Patreon, merchandise, product commissions, and even Kickstarter campaigns means that no single event will ruin your site. I think it's important for people looking to diversify income streams to think about what each new income stream offers, rather than just duplicating an existing stream X times. I don't see any advantage in having 5 different frameworks for serving ads on a single site. I see a lot of advantages from setting up a Patreon on the side and selling podcast ads outside of your site. [0]: https://www.techdirt.com/pages/support.php https://www.techdirt.com/pages/support.php

henryfjordan 6y ago
You don't add a second ad network to widen your revenue stream just like you don't have a backup ISP to double your bandwidth. You do it so that when you have a (temporary) outage with one you can quickly switch to the other and not lose operations. There are some classes of outages that might affect both ad-streams, but there are other classes (like account status issues) that are completely independent.
- danShumway 6y ago
  But that depends a lot on whether or not the outage is actually temporary. From the sound of this article, it doesn't sound like it is. Sure, Techdirt is hedging its bets and saying it might turn Google Ads back on eventually. But the account issues they're talking about aren't going to go away; there's nobody you can yell at with Google to make their moderation suddenly better. I still want to push the idea that if you're diversifying your income, you should actually diversify it, not just have multiple accounts in the same field. There are independent issues that might effect one ad network and not another, sure. Those independent issues also won't affect podcast ads or product sponsorships. In other words, redundancy != diversity. Not to say redundancy is useless, of course. But it really doesn't sound like redundancy is Techdirt's problem here, it sounds like they're disillusioned with page ads in general.

henryfjordan 6y ago

You don't add a second ad network to widen your revenue stream just like you don't have a backup ISP to double your bandwidth. You do it so that when you have a (temporary) outage with one you can quickly switch to the other and not lose operations. There are some classes of outages that might affect both ad-streams, but there are other classes (like account status issues) that are completely independent.

danShumway 6y ago
But that depends a lot on whether or not the outage is actually temporary. From the sound of this article, it doesn't sound like it is. Sure, Techdirt is hedging its bets and saying it might turn Google Ads back on eventually. But the account issues they're talking about aren't going to go away; there's nobody you can yell at with Google to make their moderation suddenly better. I still want to push the idea that if you're diversifying your income, you should actually diversify it, not just have multiple accounts in the same field. There are independent issues that might effect one ad network and not another, sure. Those independent issues also won't affect podcast ads or product sponsorships. In other words, redundancy != diversity. Not to say redundancy is useless, of course. But it really doesn't sound like redundancy is Techdirt's problem here, it sounds like they're disillusioned with page ads in general.