In February I ramped up efforts to make my sites load faster. I ditched Elementor for Gutenberg. Switched from Yoast to the SEO Framework. Removed a lot of plugins. For most sites, I cut the number of plugins by half. Scorched earth.
Here are the numbers.
Fat Stacks NOT included in income reports
This income report ONLY includes revenue/expenses from my various niche blogs. It does NOT include revenue or expenses from Fat Stacks. Fat Stacks is a different type of site altogether. These reports are merely to demonstrate that various niche blogs can be a good business. It would be ludicrous to include revenue from Fat Stacks since it’s the very site that publishes income reports. It would state “here’s my income report based on income earned by publishing income reports.” Doesn’t make sense to me.
Revenue
There are missing sites below because I sold a bunch in December and January.
All figures are in USD.
- Niche Site 1: $63,569
- Niche Site 3: $299
- Niche Site 8 (Cyclebaron.com): $25
- Niche Site 9 : $2,209
- Niche Site 10: $147
Total Revenue from 5 sites: $66,249
The lion’s share of revenue is from display ads.
Expenses for all niche sites
I lump together all expenses for all 8 niche sites because it’s difficult, impractical and unhelpful to spend the time allocating each expense to each site.
- Kinsta hosting: $2,187
- Bluehost hosting (for cyclebaron.com): $5
- AWS Amazon: I finally got around to moving the remaining AWS images to Kinsta so this expense is history.
- VAs: $5,250
- Cloudflare: $200
- Cloudflare APO: $5
- Loom: $10
- Ahrefs: $179
- Shutterstock photos: $400
- Quickbooks: $10
- Jotform: $40
- Tailwind: $120
- MarketMuse: $1,500
- MeetEdgar: $50
- Grammarly: $45
- Canva: $48
- Buzzsprout: $12 (this is the podcast hosting platform I use for niche site 1 podcast).
- Adobe Spark: $20
- Answerthepublic.com: $99
- WP Stackable Gutenberg Block Library: $149
- SEO Framework plugin: $200
Total expenses for 8 niche sites: $10,529
Net Income: $55,720
Content investment: $15,879
Content sources include WriterAccess and in-house writers.
Net income after content investment: $39,841
I explain here why I extract content costs from expenses.
Learn more
If you’re interested in learning what I do in detail, grab my entire bundle of courses here.
Screenshot
Since the lion’s share of revenue is from AdThrive, I’ll just include an AdThrive screenshot. Additional revenue sources include EX.co, Amazon and a few other tiny revenue streams.

Jon runs the place around here. He pontificates about launching and growing online publishing businesses, aka blogs that make a few bucks. His pride and joy is the email newsletter he publishes.
In all seriousness, Jon is the founder and owner of a digital media company that publishes a variety of web properties visited and beloved by millions of readers monthly. Fatstacks is where he shares a glimpse into his digital publishing business.
Hey Jon, thanks for switching to TSF and even going for premium! I hope you are happy with us so far. I consider “serial bloggers” as one of the very few groups of users that can give us actually actionable feedback. You do no-nonsense blogging for profit and I know people like you appreciate every time saver there is. So what could we do better? What is something we should, and aren’t?
It could be SEO related, but it also does not have to. We built some things out of SEO for ourselves and included it as an extension, such as the anti-spam.
Therefore, if you ever find yourself wanting something from TSF, or having an issue, please reach out to me personally (@lebaux on twitter, reddit, gmail, protonmail and others).
Thank you and cheers!
Pierre from TSF.
Hey Pierre, thanks for chiming in. I love The SEO Framework plugin. It does everything I want it to. I don’t use all the extensions (I ponied up for the premium so I could get the extensions… totally worth it). Easy to use. Works well. I can’t think of anything to make it better.
I am happy that you are happy. You can still reach out anytime in the future. Have a productive day!