The blogosphere is buzzing with the bad news of the economic downturn. It’s all going down and certainly your site is. Or isn’t it?
Via Guy Kawasaki’s Tweet I found this article. It’s a bit of a mixed bag. Most actual publishers that were interviewed reported their income wasn’t really affected. Media watchers however reported a major drop in funds going into online advertising. Also Google Adsense, the mother of all online advertising, seems to be outputting mixed signals.
Personally, I have seen no change in CPC on the networks I use (I have experiments running with, among others, Chitika and Widgetbucks). The CPC hasn’t changed at all, as has the clickthrough rate (both terribly low 
). But I must admit that my sample size is so small, it might not be statistically significant.
On the AdWords front, I haven’t really seen any price drop. In fact, most of my campaigns are on hold, because the keywords I use are just too expensive to justify paying the market price. Maybe another round of optmization and trials might fix this, buy my current plan is to wait a little, as I do expect a drop in prices. When nobody is advertizing, that’s when to start. However, I have the feeling that’s still a long way off, if ever.
Above all, I’d say: Think positive, it certainly isn’t as bad as most newscasts want you to believe. Keep doing what you’re doing. If it’s working, it’ll keep working (at least for now). If it isn’t, there’s no better time to make a change than now.