Pros and cons of relying only on advertising revenue

Perform a search for income opportunities and you will be met with page after page of ways to make money online. Some people create sites that allow them to create multiple streams of income, while others are quite happy to have a single source of income from their websites. In many cases, that means relying solely on the advertising from the pages of a website. It sounds like a pretty simple, straightforward way to make money. But like anything, it comes with a list of pros and cons that have to be weighed before going that route.

Pros

The biggest advantage of going with advertising only for revenue is that the business model is quite simple. If you had a website with some sort of e-commerce aspect, you would have to take time to ensure that customer service was in place, and that items were shipped out in a timely fashion. On the other hand, the companies that advertise on your site are in charge of doing all that stuff on their end, which means all you need to do is cashing the commission checks that come when your visitors click on the ads being displayed on your site and make purchases on the advertiser’s websites.

With an e-commerce site, increasing the sales numbers takes an incredible amount of time and effort, and may even require you to start paying other people to help you take care of marketing, promotional activities. There are no such issues with online advertising because all that you need to scale up is to increase the number of visitors. If you can create a site that has a large and sustainable viewership, companies will be willing to pay top dollar to get their ads in front of so many people on a daily basis. That said, getting traffic is not exactly easy or free.

Cons

Going with a single source of income via advertising is a fine way to earn money, but it is not necessarily something that is for everyone because it can be risky. This is especially true for those relying on advertising revenue as their main or only source of income. Just having great ads on your site is no guarantee that anyone is actually going to click on them. Advertisers may also pull their ads if they aren’t seeing a good return on their ad spending with you. You can literally go from having a great income source to nothing at all.

Another problem that some publishers might face is having a site that is simply not suitable for online advertising. Advertisers are pretty picky about where they spend their marketing dollars, and if you have a site that does not fit their specific needs or does not have a desirable audience, they are going to go elsewhere. For example, if your business is about selling locally grown produce, it is not easy to adapt your online presence to sell advertising. Your business will likely dictate what you can do.

There is definitely a risk involved in relying solely on ads for online revenue, which is why it is generally best to have a good mix of multiple income sources.