Side Note: I know talking about Money is typically taboo, but I hope you’ll forgive me anyway. Since we’re talking about really small sums of money (under $10 total) I figure it’s probably not too offensive a topic. I also personally find the topic of blogging income fascinating, and I’m sure someone out there does as well. I pledge to be as open and honest on this topic as I can, as allowed by the terms of service that I’ve agreed to.

Six months ago, on my one year blogiversery, I mentioned I pipe dream of one day supplementing my grad school income with revenue from my blog. To be honest, I never did and still don’t expect it to happen. At that time, however, I had already earned a dollar. Now, that I have a few more data points the math geek in me couldn’t help but crunch some numbers.

The first thing I did was plotted my total revenue and fitted a trend line.

That’s a quadratic trend line with an R² of .947 (which is statistical speak for the trend line matches the data fairly well).

Using the trend line I see it will take 24 years before I have a profitable year, meaning in 24 years I can expect the ad revenue to equal the cost of the webhosting and domain purchase for just one year. It’ll take an additional 25 years until I’m out of the red completely. Yes, it will take a predicted 50 years from the day I first installed wordpress before I recoup the costs of blogging. Guess I won’t break out the Champaign anytime soon.

On the other hand, in just 615 years I’ll be a millionaire, and in 861 years I’ll be a multimillionaire.

Since the amount of revenue is so small, I really can’t do much analysis of what types of content generates the most revenue for this blog. I can see that my visitors appear to be mostly internet searchers looking for answers to questions or general information, and not specifically for me. The most common search key words and phrases that lead to my blog include ‘do it yourself’ and ‘diy’.

Term cloud of keyword searches for my blog last month

In terms of content, the do it yourself maternity photography posts seem to be the most popular, although they will soon be eclipsed by the newborn photography posts. According to google analytics, the maternity pages have the lowest bounce and exit rate of any of the popular entrance points. Visitors who view those posts are more likely to also read other posts on my blog. Dare I hope that this means some of you out there like my photography? Or at least prefer it to my other content?

While I don’t have much in the way of repeat visitors, the traffic to my blog is increasing. The monthly number of visitors has increased 226% over this time last year. (Of course there were no maternity nor newborn DIY photography posts at this time last year!)

I will have to find more adorable subjects to photograph so that I can retire before I’m 640ish. Either that, or convince Domingo we want a really large family.

Posted in Internet & Technology | Tags: Doing the Math, Meta-Blogging