MsHuggys - 3:45 pm on Jan 24, 2009 (gmt 0)

From reading the above posts, I guess it really depends on the nitch. We have lost 90% of our in-house advertisers in the past two months. Most of those had been with us for many years. We didn't lose them because our traffic had declined.

We lost them because they can no longer afford to advertise, or they closed their business. It is not just our high end clients who have left. When a business cancels a low end advertising budget of $3 a month, that really says alot. In the past month, the number of small advertisers who pay by credit card automatically each month and had their payment bounce has skyrocketed. This is something we have NEVER seen before. Our advertisers do not bounce payments to us. It has to be very humiliating to have a $3 payment bounce because there is no money on the credit card. So, the account cancellation comes right after that. Now, I get bounced payments constantly. It is undeniable the online community has been hit, and hit hard.

Then, on to the Adsense advertisers, the same thing has taken place. We are getting slammed with no end in sight. Our big money making B2B site that has carried us for many years, slides more each dsy. Traffic is steady, and has not declined at all, in fact on January 19th we had some of the highest traffic we have seen in the past year. That traffic a year ago, would have earned us three times what we made a few days ago.

One thing that is really a strong indicator of how many businesses are hurting is the number of businesses coming to me requesting our free advertising option. We get at least three requests a day. Normally, we get about three requests a month because most businesses could not pass up the very cheap low end account option.

The money is now coming from different sectors, with smaller and newer sites we own filling some of the revenue voids our cornerstone web site has left wide open. If not for those sites, we would be sunk right now. Because this down turn may not end in the next year, we are throwing all our effort into those smaller sites that are carrying the ball right now.

I've been on the web for 17 years and working on the web making a full time income for 10 years, I've never seen anything like this.