Crisis Plan When an Ad-Funded Consumer Product Suddenly Serves No Ads

You are the product manager for a consumer product that earns its revenue from advertising. Ad revenue has been large and steady day after day. Then, on one particular day, the product stops serving ads altogether and revenue falls to zero. As the PM, what is your strategy for handling this crisis? Cover how you would find out what happened, what you would do while it is unresolved, and what should change afterward. ```hint Find the broken link Revenue only appears after a chain of steps: a user opens the product, an ad slot is requested, a buyer fills it, the ad renders, and the impression is counted and billed. Ask which link went to zero, and what kind of cause can wipe out all of it in a single day rather than gradually. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Did revenue fall off a cliff within a few hours, or slide for a while before reaching zero on that day? - Is the outage total, or are some platforms, countries or ad formats still showing ads? - Are the ads sold directly to advertisers through our own ad server, bought through third-party ad networks and exchanges, or a mix of both? - Is user traffic normal, and did anything ship or change in the product or the ad stack just before the drop? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - Running it as a top-severity incident: who gets pulled in, how the cost per hour is sized, and who is kept informed, including finance and advertisers - A diagnosis that first confirms the drop is real and scopes it, then tests causes in a sensible order across user traffic, the ad delivery system, and advertisers and demand partners - Mitigations matched to each likely root cause, including which fixes can be rolled back quickly and which cannot - Recovery metrics with guardrails for user experience, ad quality and advertiser delivery - Prevention once it is resolved: faster detection, safer releases and less dependence on any single source of ad demand ### Follow-up Questions - Suppose the cause turns out to be your main ad network suspending your account for a policy violation. What do you do in the first day, and what do you change over the next quarter? - Once ads are back, leadership asks to raise the number of ads per session for a week to win back the lost revenue. How do you respond? - A total revenue outage should never go unnoticed for long. What monitoring would catch it within minutes?