It feels like I just did this, looking back at the previous year. Time is different, both slower and faster, when you don't move or change jobs. My little hobby business is a little easier to evaluate this year because I don't have the income from working a 1099 job intermingling with the "fun." I suppose the news isn't really good, but it's not really bad either.
On paper, I financially took a loss. I consider travel related to the sites to be expenses, and this was also a year where I upgraded a lot of equipment and software. It was time. My desktop (a 2009 iMac) hasn't even been on my desk most of the year, as I relegated it to Simon, so it was time to squeeze in a replacement before the end of the year. Also, I took a hit on some things that I knew weren't cost effective, but certainly fun. Creating something like Opening Thunderbird meant spending money on an extra equipment, checking equipment on my flights, licensing music, etc. The direct expenses to make that, not including the equipment I already had, was about a grand.
Ad revenue was down about 7%. Visits were down only a few points on CoasterBuzz, but more on PointBuzz because traffic in the first part of the year was down (the audience grows and shrinks based on what they're building for next year). Page views on both sites went down, partly because of the newer version of the forums which result in fewer unique views and more dynamic page loading. Mostly the ad drop was the reduction in visits but CPM's continued to take a dump toward the middle of the year, which is the worst time because that's our highest traffic period. Strangely, the rates stabilized, and went up, in the last quarter, but that's also our slowest time of year. The most troubling part of the story remains the same: User per user, page view per page view, we make half of what we did five years ago, and that sucks. This year, the story was that Google completely failed, and I think we were lucky that the backup ad providers more or less made up for it. I miss the good old days where you could reliably expect Google to score more than a grand a month.
Club memberships were down a little, but not dramatically so. My suspicion is that it's because there were fewer events this year. On the plus side, events have largely gone club agnostic, and there's little incentive to fly your own events anymore. I do think it's time to look at family memberships, however. They sell so well that the average cost per member is only $11.43, which is way too low. For years I've charged $25 for the primary member, then $5 for up to three more. It brings the average way down. That said, I don't think the add-ons are really site users, and they're more in it for events. I think ten bucks would still be a deal, but I wonder how it would overall affect membership. I can't count on ad revenue, clearly, so I have to be careful.
On the expense side, moving to Azure has been a huge win. The apps can't run multi-node yet, but the next forum version will get me there. I'm also planning to use the search service, which should be way more accurate. I honestly would like to spend twice as much so I can be redundant and faster, but it's a hard sell when ad revenue is so crappy.
In April I did a refresh of CoasterBuzz, mostly to get on v13 of the forums, but also to get to one, responsive design instead of the different mobile views. The payload is larger this way, but on LTE connections it's still crazy fast. Anecdotally, I think I might be getting some Google juice on the sites for the speed. That's why I like controlling the whole stack of software (that, and I have no excuse since it's what I do).
We didn't do anything with QuiltLoop. I think I'll likely just shut it down at some point. I still think there's a good idea out there, but I don't have time to think about it.
POP Forums gets a lot more action since moving it to GitHub, which is not surprising. Right now, I'm in the early stages of rebuilding it for ASP.NET 5/MVC 6, which is a pretty substantial change. So far, I would even say that I wouldn't convert existing apps to the new frameworks unless I was planning to use them for years to come. It's a lot of work, and very much a clean-sheet Web pipeline that throws away the baggage of old ASP.NET. Again, it's not strictly part of the business, but it's the basis for the sites and keeps me current.
I would also like to port the very basic CoasterBuzz database mobile app to iOS and Android using Xamarin, since I have a free subscription until the fall. It shouldn't be that hard, but I just haven't figured out when I'll commit the time to it.
I imagine next year will be profitable, as I'm not planning much travel and do not expect to buy any equipment. That hopefully means increasing the charitable contributions as well, which were not as large this year.
No comments yet.