Here are the numbers for January 2021. As expected, sizeable drop in ad revenue. Big increase in content investment.
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: $60,496
- Niche Site 3: $270
- Niche Site 8 (Cyclebaron.com): $44
- Niche Site 9 : $1,914
- Niche Site 10: $135
Total Revenue from 5 sites: $62,859
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:Â $2,161
- 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:Â $400
- Quickbooks: $10
- Jotform: $40
- Tailwind: $120
- MarketMuse: $1,500
- MeetEdgar: $50
- Grammarly:Â $45
- Canva: $48
- Buzzsprout:Â $12 (this is the podcast hosting platform I use for niche site 1 podcast).
- Adobe Spark: $20
- Answerthepublic.com: $99
Total expenses for 8 niche sites: $10,150
Net Income: $52,709
Content investment: $16,204
Content sources include WriterAccess and in-house writers.
Net income after content investment:Â Â $36,505
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.
Screenshots
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.
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.
