Revenue & Platform Strategy

Your traffic is declining. Your revenue model wasn't built for this.

I help high-traffic platforms and organisations with legacy revenue structures — music publishers, reference sites, education institutions — identify and fix structural revenue and platform risks before AI and search shifts erode 30–50% of their income.

Book a conversation

The structural problem

If your platform was built on organic search traffic, you already know the numbers are moving in the wrong direction. AI Overviews, zero-click search, and traffic redistribution are not temporary headwinds. They are permanent structural changes to how content platforms acquire and monetise audiences.

This hits hardest when you have decades of accumulated content, complex revenue structures built over generations (licensing, royalties, memberships, legacy partnerships), and organisational muscle memory that assumes traffic growth. Music publishers, reference platforms, and education institutions face a double bind: declining distribution and revenue models that assume the old distribution economics.

Most organisations are responding with optimisation: better SEO, tighter ad targeting, cost cuts. That buys time. It doesn't solve the problem.

93%+
of high-intent queries now show AI Overviews
-33%
YoY organic traffic for global publishers (2025)
60%
of Google searches now end without a click

The question is not how to recover traffic. It is: what does your business look like when Google is no longer your primary distribution partner? And if you have 30+ years of revenue architecture: which parts of it still work?

The 4-Week Revenue & Platform Survival Audit

A structured engagement that delivers a clear diagnosis, quantified exposure, and a prioritised 90-day roadmap your leadership team can act on.

Week 1

Diagnostic Intake

Stakeholder interviews. Revenue model review. Traffic and acquisition analysis. Market structure and history. Customer value flow mapping. Initial risk hypotheses.

Week 2

Structural Analysis

Revenue sensitivity modelling with scenario parameters. AI and search impact scenarios. Conversion and monetisation review. Product velocity and operational constraints. Exposure map and constraint map.

Week 3

Strategic Options

Where revenue can shift. What should be stopped. What to accelerate. Quick wins versus structural moves. Operational metrics: current state versus what's needed.

Week 4

Decision Framework

Prioritised 90-day roadmap. Organisational implications. Resource reality check. Elephants and hard decisions. Executive presentation with scenarios and options.

Not slides and generic recommendations. Quantified revenue exposure, dependency modelling, architecture constraints mapped, and a 90-day execution roadmap tied to your organisational reality.


Why this, not the alternatives

There are many ways to get strategic advice. Most of them miss something important.

AlternativeTypical costWhat you getWhat's missing
Big 4 consulting£50–100k+A recognised nameDomain knowledge. Operational experience. Speed.
Brand agencies£30–50kBrand directionTechnical analysis. Disruption understanding. Revenue modelling.
Tech consultancies£15–20kTechnology reviewCommercial overview. P&L experience. Structural context.
Vendor conversationsFree (with purchase implication)A solutionSolution neutrality. Structural analysis. Your interests first.
Internal reviewsHeadcount timeInside knowledgeExternal perspective. Structural blind spots. Conway's Law awareness.
This auditFixed priceRevenue modelling + platform analysis + disruption scenarios + 90-day roadmapNothing you can't build on.

How I think

Published strategic teardowns applying this methodology to real organisations.


About

I'm Dan Frost. I've spent my career in senior product and technology leadership at large-scale digital content businesses — the kind of organisations where traffic economics, monetisation logic, platform architecture, and internal politics all intersect.

I specialise in one problem: helping high-traffic platforms and organisations with legacy revenue structures understand and respond to structural revenue risk from AI and search disruption. I combine revenue modelling, product velocity analysis, and platform architecture expertise in a way that most consultants — who see only one layer — cannot.

I work with education institutions, music publishers, reference platforms, and content businesses with long operational histories. If your organisation has 1M+ monthly users, relies on organic search for a significant share of audience or revenue, and has a revenue structure built over decades, we should talk.

Let's start with a conversation

30 minutes. No pitch. I'll tell you what I see.

dan@danfrost.co.uk