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 🤬
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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
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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
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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)
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Yep, substack is what I'm considering most seriously. It's a significant format shift for me for blog-style content though and in some ways would be a downgrade.
