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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Do you have any wpengine affiliate links? Hosting affiliate shizzle pays more than Amazon 😁
Many blogs that claim to be about one thing actually just print money as hosting affiliates
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One good "how to blog like vgr" post with a dash of hosting links in and you'll be in your mansion in no time
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band-aid move that will only temporarily help... I need a deep rethink/pivot of why/how I'm doing ribbonfarm at all
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Well you've been down that rabbit hole for a while... But you also staunchly under-monetize ribbonfarm. Not sure the real lesson is that blogs are getting too cost prohibitive to run....
My static site blog is free :)
(Don't get half a mill visits tho)
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Yeah, I'm not opposed to monetization in principle, just need a mode that's in line with how I like to operate. Right now, it's looking like best option would be to retire the existing WP-based ribbonfarm and move the future to substack.
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Sometimes it feels like ribbonfarm and slatestarcodex are the last regular longform blogs still doing their thing... everybody else has moved on to newsletters and medium etc
But I agree, in some big ways it would be a mistake. I'd have to give up experiments like blogchaining etc
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Maybe you need to launch a new site to experiment with new models / tech. I feel like WP becomes barnacle crusted after a long period
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