Interesting money stuff

So, I have no ads here. I did at one point, but I decided to pull them from this blog.

The other one, though, has ads. And they were doing pretty good for a while, and I changed to a new ad network thingy. It lost me the more profitable adsense space, but it brings in traffic (mostly) and was earning more.

I don't know what's up, but September seems to be a crap month for advertising. It's probably better on family or child-centered blogs, but food and general life crap? I'm making more (and have *made* more) on the much less profitable adsense placement than I am off my big pretty hot-spot ad.

Part of it, I suspect, is due to some kinda blogger flub. But mostly? There's no ad inventory. something like 2/3rds of my page loads have been PSA's or in-house ads. that's 2/3rds of my pageloads earning either nothing or almost nothing. It's kinda a startling change.

Good thing I don't live off that revenue, I'd starve to death. Ok, I'd starve to death faster.

It does help me realize that if/ when I get everything going with web sites and whatnot, I need to make sure that money can come in from more than one place. There *are* ad networks that will fill in with ads from other networks when they have nothing to serve, but this isn't one of them.

It really reinforces the whole "diversify" thing. Lucky for me the blog is for fun and keeping track, or I'd be forked. I think about this more than i probably should, actually. With building a working-for-myself type life I am running into this more.

I probably ran into it more when I was working for a company in a "real" job, but when your ability to pay rent depends on kissing the boss' ass and behaving in public, you try not to think about that stuff. Now I'm trying to build as many different streams of income as I can find. Every dollar that comes from blogging, or book reviews, or a website I build, or an article that sells at CC is 100 fewer words I have to write for textbroker. Forget saving the earth, I just want to save my wrists at this point.

Now I just need to get the novelling going so I can earn real, live royalties. Write once and get paid for it forever (or until the book pirates get their hands on it... either one works for me).

But, yeah, oddness with the advertising income this month.