A Day in Paradise

A blogger just sent this termination email that they got from Creative Weblogging.

As you may have seen the global economy is going for a bad year and it hits marketing expenses first many advertisers that have been spending tens of thousands of dollars here at Creative Weblogging are just not spending at all anymore.

We also recently switched to no-follow, which greatly improved our traffic numbers but also decreased our ability to monetize traffic.

So were forced to change contract structure again and have removed many paying contracts in the English network. We will have a joint sessions here tomorrow that will evaluate German blogs more intensively.

If you blog for an English blog and you still have your contract it is very likely it will stay. Same is true for German blogs once tomorrows evaluation is done.

We sincerely regret taking these steps but the good times are over and we all need to make our houses ready for the upcoming storm. Things may like VERY different in 36 months so please check back with us from time to time how current hiring goes.

This article on forbes.com suggests that people are tightening their belts by moving from traditional internet advertising (like the above) and moving to google & other search advertising.

The same article goes on to talk about Wikia and how they are also suffering.

While the downturn chokes spending for Google’s major competitors, it may also cut off funding for potential foes in their embryo stages. One potential upstart competitor, Wikia Search, may already be feeling the crunch: Its parent company, Wikia, announced this week that it will lay off 10% of staff. More generally, the credit crisis has made IPOs all but impossible for small start-ups and has chilled venture capitalists’ enthusiasm for young potential Google-killers.

There is a lot of things wrong with the article (I can’t remember the last start-up IPO) and any “search engine” that fails because because they can’t find advertisers in the first year, deserves to fail.