Income Report for May 2020 (7 Niche Sites)

How’s this for late?

May’s income report published in August.

There are two reasons for this.

First, I’ve been swamped launching new niche sites, moving all sites to AdThrive, launching courses, writing content, putting a lot of time in the Fat Stacks email newsletter plus a pile of other random stuff that comes up.

Second, a couple months ago I decided to stop publishing these.  Clearly, I’ve changed my mind. I changed my mind because people asked that I keep publishing these and when I don’t do these, I don’t actually crunch the numbers each month. While tedious and time-consuming, it’s good to know each month how much is coming in and how much is going out.

Here’s the income report.

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 independent niche sites.

Revenue for 7 niche sites I own (May 2020)

Click here to learn more about each niche site featured in my income reports.

All figures are in USD.

• Niche Site 1 Revenue: $51,313
• Niche Site 2 Revenue: $4,869
• Niche Site 3 Revenue: $1,065
• Niche Site 4 Revenue: $767
• Niche Site 5 Revenue: $0
• Niche Site 6 Revenue: $80
• Niche Site 7 Revenue: $111

Total Revenue all 7 sites: $58,205 (April revenue was: $45,798)

Expenses for all niche sites

I lump together all expenses for all 7 niche sites because it’s difficult, impractical and unhelpful to spend the time allocating each expense to each site.

• Ezoic Premium Ad Program Fees: $288
• Kinsta hosting:  $1,886
• Amazon AWS (still host some images on this): $278
• VAs: $4,809 (my full-time Pinterest manager increased this cost a fair bit but given she’s almost tripled Pinterest traffic, she’s well worth every dollar.  She’s actually an exceptional assistant in every respect. I got lucky).
• Cloudflare: $23
• Techsmith (Jing storage): $8
• Loom: $10
• Ahrefs: $179
• Shutterstock photos:  $400
• Quickbooks: $10
• Jotform: $40
• Tailwind: $84
• MeetEdgar: $50
• Grammarly:  $45
• LeadPages: $37
• OptinMonster: $59
• NitroPack: $100
• Canva: $48
• Buzzsprout:  $12 (this is the podcast hosting platform I use for niche site 1 podcast).
• Codeable:  $2,849  Hired a site speed consultant.

Total expenses for 7 niche sites: $11,215

Net Income: $46,990 (April net icnome was $37,103)

Content investment in May 2020

I continue to pour money into content.  I ramped up in May.

• WriterAccess: $12,000
• Textbroker: $500
• In-House writers: $3,461
• Content Strategist: 7

Total content investment for May 2020:  ,588

Net income after content investment: ,402 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 D

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.