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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Replying to @vgr
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 affiliates1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @tomcritchlow @vgr
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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Replying to @tomcritchlow
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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Replying to @vgr
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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Replying to @tomcritchlow
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
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Replying to @vgr @tomcritchlow
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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Replying to @vgr
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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