[tomeric]

We run a big online restaurant guide in The Netherlands.

At the beginning of 2009, our income from AdSense (our main source of income) halved overnight and later dropped to about 25%. We had a little bit of money in the bank, but not enough to survive for more than a few months.

We immediately focussed on finding and developing alternative sources of income and those sources have now become our main sources of income and have enabled us to grow a lot.

Without that crisis, we probably wouldn't have grown as much as we have.

[Luyt]

"At the beginning of 2009, our income from AdSense (our main source of income) halved overnight"

Did you ever find out why this happened? I'm also curious which alternative way of income you eventually found.

[tomeric]

We think it was because of the economic crisis. The restaurant sector was hit pretty hard and that probably caused a lot of companies to stop advertising.

The revenue is now back to it's old levels, but it stayed that way for 6-7 months.

We started a program that allowed restaurants to advertise directly with us. Made it very easy to try by not having any contracts and being a lot cheaper than our competitors. We got someone to do sales on a commission-only basis. He was so good (~ 70% of the restaurants he calls become a customer) that he is now a partner.

We also added affiliate links to sites where you can order food online, make reservations, etc.

[reitzensteinm]

Anecdotally, the Adsense revenue for my old startup also collapsed in late 2008/early 2009, from a peak of $1.00 cpm to $0.17 for exactly the same ad and roughly the same mix of traffic.

We went through a similar transition, although we started ours much earlier. If you make your page full of ads, you should be able to scrape together $1 cpm pretty easily, but sell extra content to a good game on that same page and it'll yield $10+ cpm - my latest game is a $50 cpm. That's a pretty serious difference!