What it costs to run my sites, 2023 edition

Oh, and RPM so far today is 19 cents. 🤦‍♂️

I do not understand the Google ad system. The last three days I had overall RPM's well over a dollar, which means I'm more than covering cost. Today it was back down to 40 cents, and with pretty good traffic, too. I can't win.

Really hoping this trial screws Google.

Thank you for visiting, by the way.

I’m late to the party here however, I really think you should consider replacing the club with patreon. I am and I think the majority of the internet are suckers for monthly subscriptions. Especially when it’s $5ish a month. I have a number of patreon subscriptions for YouTubers that I rarely watch anymore but still value their content and won’t stop the support. I give Wikipedia $5 a month because they asked nicely for it and I value the content.

I don’t post often, but I do read the content here and joined the club because I value the content, especially threads where Rideman gets involved. CoasterBuzz Club is the only subscription where I pay by the year, when I don’t forget about it. It would be nice to have a showtime rotisserie oven setting where I could just set it and forgot it.

If I wanted to go that route, I don't need Patreon (or for them to keep a cut), I could just implement it here. Doing monthly subs is pretty easy. I'm not sure that many people would really do it though. I mean, I don't think that I would spend $60 a year on a site like this. :)

FWIW, I would gladly support this site for 5x that if that's what it took to keep it going.

FWIW, I'm cool with $25 a year.

I definitely think you could provision your own monthly donation thing, but as a doner there's some value in me having 12 things to manage in one place vs. 12 things to manage in 12 places. Plus, when I login to Patreon all the things I care about are in one place, additional "stuff" on the back of my donation - most of which I don't really care about.

It's like anything, the internet was supposed to be lots of cool indy stuff and then consolidation happened and ruined everything.

Finally some good news from Google... they're moving strictly to an inventory model, so I don't have to rely on the probability/improbability of clicks. That should, at the very least, smooth out the erratic payouts. Unfortunately it'll miss the holiday season, which is usually the slowest traffic time, but it could be made up on higher prevailing ad rates. I want some of that Mean Girls/Wal-Mart money!

As the year ends, I wanted to share some numbers since it seems like some folks are interested. This site had a remarkable 37% jump in page views this year. I can't explain why, other than maybe Google favors the site more with the performance improvements over the last year.

By contrast, ad revenue was down 30%, on top of the 42% decline last year. Again, fingers crossed that Google's shift to CPM helps.

Regardless, thank you for visiting. It would have been much worse if you visited less.

I think I have good news. In February, Google transitioned to CPM advertising, which means "cost per thousand," instead of CPC which is "cost per click." What that means is that I get paid for a page view, whether someone clicks on an ad or not. Now, November to February are the slowest traffic months of the year, so it's hard to say what the improvement is, but it's 89% better than last month, and 30% better than the same period last year.

Traffic has been on the rise for the last year and a half, so it's interesting to see where this goes. Maybe Google saw the same thing I did, that traffic was up while revenue was sinking. If demand is up (as it should be in an election year), maybe this will push up as rates.

The weird thing about the Internet is that in the old days, getting your brand visible in front of people was valuable. Then it stopped being valuable unless someone clicked on something. It makes no sense. Here's hoping that's changed.