It’s May and I’m finally getting to publishing March’s income report.
It’s been a busy few months managing multiple niche sites.
It turned out March was a banner month. It followed 3 months of decent traffic growth combined with high ad RPMs being the 3rd month in the quarter (ad RPMs are typically high during the last month of a quarter). The end result was some excellent results. I suspect it may be a while before I reach these numbers again. I enjoyed it while it lasted. How’s that for optimism.
My smaller niche sites are growing but at a snail’s pace. I invest little into them, but do put something into them to prime them in the event I have the time and resources to really pour some fuel on them.
Table of Contents
DISCLAIMER: This income report does NOT include revenue or expenses from fatstacksblog.com. I only include revenue and expenses from my other sites. I don’t really see the point of disclosing revenue on the very blog that discusses how I run niche blogs and websites.
Below I enumerate each niche site and will use the same numbers (i.e. Site 1, Site 2, etc.) in each income report so you can see progress or lack of progress. Some will do well and I expect some to not do well.
All figures are in USD.
Niche Site 1
- Display Ad revenue (all ad networks): $36,720 (this is my #1 ad network and you can learn more about the high-performing video ad unit I use here).
- Affiliate revenue: $3,626
Total revenue: $40,346
Niche Site 2
- Display Ad revenue (all ad networks): $141
- Affiliate revenue: $5,307
Total revenue: $5,448
Niche Site 3:
- Display Ad revenue (all ad networks): $1,634
- Affiliate revenue: $158
Total revenue: $1,791
Niche Site 4
- Display Ad revenue (all ad networks): $497
- Affiliate revenue: $52
Total revenue: $549
Niche Site 5
- Display Ad revenue (all ad networks): $69
- Affiliate revenue: $0
Total revenue: $69
Niche Site 6
- Display Ad revenue (all ad networks): $50
- Affiliate revenue: $0
Total revenue: $50
Niche Site 7
- Display Ad revenue (all ad networks): $4.68
- Affiliate revenue: $0
Total revenue: $4.68
Total Revenue all 7 sites: $48,258 (February 2019 revenue was: $37,495)
Expenses for all sites (except fatstacksblog.com)
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. I did deduct a small portion of expenses that are absorbed by fatstacksblog.com such as hosting, AWeber and Ahrefs.
- Kinsta hosting: $1,563
- Amazon AWS (still host some images on this): $226
- AWeber: $417
- VA (hired from OnlineJobs.ph): $1,080
- Cloudflare: $23
- Techsmith (Jing storage): $8
- Ahrefs: $89
- Shutterstock photos: $800
- istockphoto: $299
- Quickbooks: $10
- Jotform: $20
- Advertising: $3,179
- Tailwind: $40
- MeetEdgar: $50
Total expenses for 7 niche sites: $7,804
Net Income: $40,454 USD
Content investment in March 2019
Total content investment: $3,744
Net income after content investment: ,710 USD
I explain here why I extract content cost from expenses.
Jon Dykstra is a six figure niche site creator with 10+ years of experience. His willingness to openly share his wins and losses in the email newsletter he publishes has made him a go-to source of guidance and motivation for many. His popular “Niche site profits” course has helped thousands follow his footsteps in creating simple niche sites that earn big.
This is great! In the future, it would be even better if you could include some Google Analytics data to see the traffic 🙂
I’ve heard good things about Monumetric – what type of RPM are you looking at on average? Have you considered other platforms like Ezoic or Mediavine?
Hey Graham, I would add some Analytics screeshots but Google doesn’t permit divulging RPM info which you could easily calculate if I set out page view data.