In July not much changed other than continuing as-is.
Continuing as-is (focusing on publishing content) is working very well. Normally revenue plateaus in July, but this year it jumped a bit.
Some niche sites improved, some dropped. Overall, I’m very happy with the trajectory of my content publishing business.
I’ve shaved some expenses, but content cost is still really high. I guess that’s expected when launching many new sites.
Almost all sites are now running AdThrive ads. The transition is taking a few weeks. The final sites were onboarded in early August.
That’s about it. Here are the numbers.
DISCLAIMER: This income report does NOT include any revenue or expenses pertaining to Fat Stacks blog. All revenue and expenses are derived solely from my SOME of my independent niche sites.
Revenue for 7 8 niche sites I own (July 2020)
Click here to learn more about each niche site featured in my income reports.
All figures are in USD.
- Niche Site 1 Revenue: $57,232
- Niche Site 2 Revenue: $4,852
- Niche Site 3 Revenue: $491
- Niche Site 4 Revenue: $1348
- Niche Site 5 Revenue: $0
- Niche Site 6 Revenue: $435
- Niche Site 7 Revenue: $130
- Niche Site 8 (Cyclebaron.com) Revenue: $0
Total Revenue all 7 sites: $64,488 (June revenue was: $59,398)
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: $1,600
- Bluehost hosing (for cyclebaron.com): $5
- Amazon AWS (still host some images on this): $154
- Lasso: $80
- VAs: $4,650
- Cloudflare: $200
- Loom: $10
- Ahrefs: $179
- AWeber: $49 (still use AWeber for my small B2B site)
- Shutterstock photos: $400
- Quickbooks: $10
- Jotform: $40
- Tailwind: $120
- MeetEdgar: $50
- Grammarly: $45
- NitroPack: $150
- Canva: $48
- Buzzsprout: $12 (this is the podcast hosting platform I use for niche site 1 podcast).
- Adobe Spark: $20
Total expenses for 7 niche sites: $7,822
Net Income: $56,666 (June net income was $50,783)
Content investment in July 2020
- WriterAccess: $8,000
- Content Refined: $8,640
- In-House writers: $720
Total content investment for June 2020: ,360
Net income after content investment: ,306 USD
I explain here why I extract content costs from expenses.
Screenshots (just a couple of the main ones)
AdThrive (Site 1)
EX.co (formerly Playbuzz)
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.
Hyperbole? Maybe, but go check it out to see what some readers say.
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.
Fantastic revenue Jon – really impressive. I have 2 questions:
1. I thought that AdThrive doesn’t allow any other ads apart from their own ads. But I see that you also use playbuzz.
2. You’ve used to highly recommend Ezoic but you are now completely with Adthrive. Are they performing better than Ezoic? Was there any other reason for the move?
As far as I’m aware both companies help you with the setup so it would be worthwhile sharing why you’ve moved.
At the moment you are (also) recommending Ezoic but you stopped using them on all your sites so this raises some questions.
Hey Jason, good questions.
1. AdThrive does let me use Playbuzz which is great. It outperforms Adthrive’s video player and I think PB’s is a better player.
2. Ezoic is great but IMO, AdThrive is better. It’s fully handled, revenue is great and AT can display ads on infinite scroll content. All my sites have infinite scroll (except Fat Stacks). Ezoic can’t display on infinite scroll.
I still recommend Ezoic if not accepted into AdThrive.
Congratulations, great results.
It’s interesting to look at your site with the bikes, what it will bring traffic and profit.