Good to have this post revived.
You can see from my details that I have just come back to DNForum. I have been hanging out over at Digital Point for the pats 8 years where I have been buying good domain names with websites that others have let go for whatever reasons. I always thought websites with good domains trumped good domains without a site. I tried to stay in the travel niche so as to consolidate and cross-promote my sites. And I tried to steer clear of junk content and auto-blog sites to ensure I had quality products in my portfolio.
So those sites (and many others that I created from scratch) which now total 150, were out there day and night earning a bit or a lot of money from: affiliates, advertising, subscriptions, and PPC. This was my full-time job.
Fast forward to today and I find all my income sources have been reduced (by around 25 per cent in the past year) for various reasons including:
1. Changing patterns of use by site visitors: not so ready to click ads, short time spent on sites, and better alternatives than my sites.
2. Competition from sites that have really established themselves as leaders in their niche.
3. Advertisers who have worked establishing their own sites and no longer need promotion.
4. Lower returns from Adsense due to poorly delivered ads and, I believe, less margin on clicks being passed on by Google.
5. Search engine shuffles by Google which make or break a site as far as traffic goes.
Now I realise that I have not adapted as fast as I should have to the changing circumstances, and I should have concentrated on a couple of sites rather than spreading myself so thinly, but that's the way it panned out. When you are in the think of things, making money and having fun, you can omit to see the bigger picture. I still own some good sites, but without a dominant player in my niche, I can see the writing on the wall for my "empire" in the years to come.
So, here I am back at DNF to check out the domaineering scene. A scene, incidentally, which I can see has moved towards getting content on domains while waiting for a time to sell the name, rather than waiting for a name to become "valuable". I hope to learn a lot.