The ad revenue crash, in one chart

I know that I've spent some time this year complaining about ad revenue, and even outlined what it costs to run my sites, but after a brief semi-reprieve early this summer, it's gone back to pretty terrible. You can tell the story in one chart from the last three years:

The graph represents the revenue for every thousand ad impressions. If the RPM is $1, then I get a dollar after showing a thousand ads. Last year wasn't great, but it was at least a break-even proposition. You can see that most days in 2022 were between $0.80 and $1.60, which still isn't great, but this year it has been almost entirely below 80 cents. And mind you, traffic on CoasterBuzz is actually up about 3% this year, and PointBuzz up 13%. (Annoyingly though, traffic dropped on PB once Cedar Point announced the new ride. It's apparently more interesting to wildly speculate about a new ride than to talk about it as it's actually being built before your eyes.) The traffic increases obviously won't compensate for an ad rate that's been cut in half.

This month I'll miss covering the hosting costs by about $40. That's not a huge deal, but I'm not crazy about the idea of subsidizing the sites forever if the ad situation doesn't turn around. I keep hoping that the Google ad monopoly will be broken by some kind of action out of the FTC's lawsuit against them, but I'm not even a little confident that anything will come of it, seeing as how the trial is basically happening in secret.

Again, the problem is that there are no secondary ad providers. It used to be that if Google didn't have an ad to show, you could forward the view to another provider, and even to another after that. For years I had them chained like this, and 65% would come from the primary, the next 25% from the backup, and the last 10% from the backup of the backup. There were times when the net RPM was consistently over $3, so even on a slow day a dozen years ago, with 12k impressions, I could net a grand a month. And sure, that sounds like margin, but keep in mind that I also had to buy new computers every couple of years, plus software. Remember, I make everything in terms of the software running the site. There's also the video equipment, when I would once or twice a year make some original video. Then on the PointBuzz side, Walt has generally kept up with good camera equipment as well, and he gets a share of the PB revenue.

Now, technically, yes, there are some other ad providers I could use. Certainly you've been to sites where you have to "X out" two videos or things sliding over the text and images as you scroll, right? Great experience, right? Of course it isn't. That stuff makes the Internet shitty. I'd rather close the sites down than subject people to that. So for relatively non-intrusive display ads, Google is the only game in town. It all funnels through them, unless it's on one of the closed platforms, most of which Facebook owns, so technically there's a duopoly. Either way, it sucks for independent publishers and service providers. It's another reason to reduce or eliminate the big social platforms from your life.

The saving grace in the spring is that the CoasterBuzz Club revenue at least cushions the blow for two or three months. But membership, which at one point leveled out around 700, is less than a hundred these days. Again, traffic hasn't varied much over the last decade, but we don't do events anymore, and most of the parks don't have any club membership requirements for their events either. The whole value proposition has become, "I value the site, so I'll help out," which unfortunately doesn't attract many devotees. 

For now, mostly I'm going to bitch about the situation, and that's all. A year from now, who knows.