Hosting costs up 45% YOY, and Amazon affiliate income down 26% YOY means ribbonfarm is, for the first time in its over a decade, not operating profitable. The internet of beefs viral spike cost me $324 and put ribbonfarm solidly about $381 in the red 🤬
Conversation
Replying to
Traffic actually went *down* slightly (deliberate, since I switched to the blogchain strategy partly as an anti-viral measure) and it would have gone down a lot more, but then I ruined it by doing the internet of beefs post. Culprit is WPEngine overage going from $1 to $2/1000
1
2
Hosting at WPEngine is still the cheapest TCO, since a cheaper host would mean either spending a lot more time myself on maintenance and crap, OR hiring someone to do it
2
1
If WPEngine hadn't changed it's billing model, the last 12mo would have cost me $1477 rather than $2124, or about $18 more rather than $617 more (WPEngine counts visits slightly differently from google, so it's not weird that it would still have gone up despite traffic down)
2
2
And without cost increase, my operating profit from Amazon affiliate income would have been about $265 instead of a loss of $381.
Moral of the story: the bar for profitably running a medium-high traffic blog as a robust, stable, CDNed, spike-tolerant WordPress site just went up.
1
2
It is kinda annoying... a quite literal go-big-or-go-home moment. I've never paid much attention to the economics of this so long as there was a slight profit, enough to pay for itself and overhead (domain name, mailchimp) and leaving a bit left over to subsidize paying authors
1
1
Where I draw the income/cost attribution boundary of ribbonfarm among my various activities is of course a bit arbitrary. I could add ebook $ on the income side for eg. or mailchimp on cost side. I've deliberately kept it simple: affiliate earnings > hosting charges = good.
3
It's messy to carve up income and cost streams... for example, I use my Zoom account for both consulting calls and recording teachable classes. Still, the headline is clear: indie WP blogs are probably down for the count cost-wise. Platform plays (medium, substack etc) win.
1
8
Actually my Cunning Plan™ last year was to move all my viral-potential writing to email (not hard to assess a priori what might). Reason plan failed was that Internet of Beefs was not obviously aligned with either of my newsletters (Breaking smart and Art of Gig)
1
Replying to
Start counting the relationships and ideas and conversations and other positive things you've gotten out of running the site, and I'm sure you're way way into the green. For the price of a used Apple Watch. Not bad.
1
Replying to
Too bad for you but it’s a national heritage site now - protected for the benefit of all of us and you will be forced to maintain it, always. 😂
2


