In one way or another we’ve all now been effected by the economic slow downs. With everything from job cuts, advertising revenue dropping, and production slowing in some form or fashion everybody has had an encounter with the ever decreasing economy. Sometimes I get the feeling I’m the only person around actually trying to increase my production… I know it’s not true a good number of businesses have been taking advantage of the low costs on production to prepare themselves for the good times.
Now even the most stable of companies are cutting jobs. Viacom (who I was working for earlier this year) is cutting 849 jobs. The cuts are a preemptive strike at keeping costs down and preparing for “possible slow downs in advertising costs” as stated by Viacom. It’s a pretty funny change from when I was working for them two years ago where I’d report that I wasn’t following through with something yet because it would cost tons of money for little productivity on my part… to which they laughed and said “Don’t worry, we’ve got plenty of money just do what you were going to do and send in your time sheet.” But I guess that’s why they have so much operational money, they take action before there is any real problem… Chevy and Ford could take some notes from them 
Personally I’ve felt the crunch big time. Being that 90% of my income is currently from advertising either ad clicks with my Yahoo, and ScribeFire accounts on my various websites, or from paid posting with SocialSpark and PayPerPost both on here and my personal blog CodySortore.com the remaining 10% of my income comes from sales on my handcrafted jewelry website ArchmailleDesigns.com I’ve seen a decline in all areas now though. My average cost per click went from 0.40 earlier this year to about 0.10 over the last three months. PayPerPost has been extremely hard to find opportunities, and at that they are paying less and less every day. With an increase of $5 opportunities it’s hard to make a living from only three posts a day, and with a decrease in the number of posts more $5 posts have been taken by bloggers. Jewelry sales have also decreased, making it nearly impossible to make a living in any of my respective niches. On one hand I’m glad that I don’t have to worry about being one of the 850 that is fired from Viacom without time to prepare, on the other hand I sort of wish that I had hung on a little bit longer and continued to bring in the cash flow from them while ramping up the blogging.
