What was the first sign, looking back, that the network was going under

One of three. That's a coin flip you've named as a warning sign, and people will act on it because you wrote it down.

It's fourth on a list of six and I said to act on two of them together. That's the whole point of a list.

There is a check nobody has mentioned, and it is free in most of the jurisdictions these entities register in.

Many countries publish company filings. Late accounts, a change of registered office to an accountancy firm's address, a director resigning without a replacement, or a charge registered against the company are all public, all dated, and all of them precede the sort of collapse being described here by months rather than weeks. In the UK and Ireland this takes about four minutes and costs nothing.

I accept that a good number of networks are registered somewhere that publishes nothing at all, and for those this is useless. But if you are carrying a five-figure balance with a network incorporated somewhere that does publish, and you have never once looked, that seems worth ten minutes a year.

Filings. On this board.

update on my 3 then 6 days one because i said i'd report back

this cycle was 11 days late. also the minimum payout went from 100 to 250 last week which is literally point 3 on marta's list and i only noticed because of this thread

pulled everything i could yesterday, got most of it, about $700 still showing as pending. moved the traffic to two other networks over the weekend. genuinely might have just saved my quarter

the $700 is gone. write it off now and stop checking the dashboard

3, 6, 11. That's the doubling. Same shape as both of mine.

If a network hits three of these but a client insists on keeping the volume there, is there anything that actually reduces exposure short of leaving?

Weekly payouts have already been refused.

Not really, but there are two things that help at the margin.

Split the volume so that no single cycle's balance is a number you'd mind losing - if they won't pay weekly, you can still cap what accrues by moving traffic out for part of each cycle. It costs you some optimisation and it turns a total loss into a partial one.

And get the balance in writing every cycle, by email, from a named person. It won't get you paid. It does matter if there's ever an administrator, because a claim with dated correspondence behind it is treated differently to a screenshot of a dashboard that no longer exists.

OP here, five months on. Recovered nothing. There was no administrator, no filing, no anything - the entity was registered somewhere that publishes nothing, which is quietaccountant's caveat in action.

What I've actually implemented from this thread, in case it's useful to anyone reading it cold:

Days-late column in the same sheet I track spend in, per network per cycle. Legal entity name on the invoice checked every quarter and pasted into the same sheet. Domain expiry checked at the same time, which takes about a minute for six networks. And a rule that I don't carry more than about three weeks of earnings anywhere I've been under a year.

The part I still can't automate is Marta_K's number six, and I think she's right that it's real and Ravenstack is right that you can't act on it. I've settled on treating it as the thing that makes me go and check the other five.

Thanks all. Genuinely more useful than I expected when I posted it angry.

Merged two duplicate threads into this one over the weekend. Leaving it open.

Bumping in December because a mid-sized one went down last week and I went through this list against it out of curiosity.

It hit four of Marta_K's six, all three of byte_broker's domain checks, and the days-late shape MetricsOverMagic described almost exactly - 2, 5, 12, nothing. The entity name on the invoice changed in August.

Every single thing in this thread was visible four months out on a network that a lot of people on this board were still recommending in October. Which either means the checklist works or means we're all very good at explaining things afterwards. I've been doing this long enough to know it's some of both.