I'm not sure if there is much to tell about my little hobby business this year. It's all about what I expected.
Ad revenue was down a little, proportional to traffic, which is actually good because it means that the CPM's mostly held their ground this year, after many years of decline. Membership revenue was up a little, which is reassuring. Overall, the lesson is that it isn't so much traffic that affects revenue, not like it did in the old days.
CoasterBuzz was down a little in traffic, I'm theorizing (based on the traffic patterns) due to a slight decline in news and its organic ability to rank in search. That, and honestly I just didn't pay that much attention to it. I did zero features this year. It was a little harder to focus on it this year because, surprisingly, working for an actual theme park company kind of makes you not want to think about it in your spare time. My life priorities have shifted a little, and even though the site was never a huge time suck, I wish I spent more time on it. It will be 15 years old in January. At the end of the day, I can deal with a minor decline, because 2014 still saw 26% more people than it did in 2011, and that's not insignificant.
PointBuzz is a victim of the usual ups and downs of Cedar Point's attraction development. On an off year with nothing new, traffic takes a crap. But it's all relative, I suppose, because if you were to compare to 2011, a wholly unremarkable year, traffic was up 42% in visits and page views. Hold that thought though... there's a bigger trend to look at around the numbers for both sites.
We actually did a semi-baked new version of PointBuzz, just a few weeks ago. The old version was getting SO crusty, running on .NET v3.5-era code. With the new forum version taking shape, and a surprising amount of code I had already written, Walt and I decided to just go for it and launch a sort-of-done-but-not-really version and start getting feedback. There are some photo pages that aren't styled, and there is zero ability to administer the photos at this point, but that's OK in the off-season. We finally moved to a responsive design and I got a ton of rapid feedback for the forum app. It even works pretty well on my old iPhone 3GS! Still quite a bit of work to do there.
I should mention that QuiltLoop, the site we thought of back in early 2013, was something I finally got back to and finished enough to publish. The idea wasn't that it would be "done," considering I had a new version of the forum in the pipe, and it was about as designed as, well, it wasn't designed. So we did a soft launch, and then promptly stopped paying attention to it. I went on to other things, and Diana didn't have time to devote to it either. Will it ever go somewhere and get more love? Maybe, but doing so would mean we'd have to coordinate our efforts, and that's a lot harder.
While not strictly a business endeavor, POP Forums is something I publish as an open source project under the company name. This year I moved it to GitHub, because it's very clear that CodePlex is being allowed to die a slow death. The commits were inconsistent this year, but I'm close to a new release. I kind of got distracted, building for big scalability, which is something that I don't actually need. I just wanted to do it because I think I can. While I've left some of that effort in the source code as a placeholder, it will be "unsupported" for now. I turned my attention to using a more modern CSS framework (Bootstrap), and adding some features that I've desperately wanted to add for some time. It's running on PointBuzz right now.
So what's the story with ad revenue? Like I said, it isn't just about page views, as mobile use, crappy ad rates and dynamic page mechanisms have changed things a great deal. I noticed this in particular on CoasterBuzz, where in 2012, the forums introduced infinite scroll topics. Instead of paging through to the next block of posts, they just load in the page. So what happened? There were 26% more users in 2014 than 2011, but 17% less page views. If you look around at the stats, a significant portion of that is because forum users aren't looking at additional pages, they're looking at one ever expanding page. That's great for users, not so great for ad views.
And then there is the mobile problem, which CB doesn't handle well at all. It uses mobile views and smaller ad formats and it's just a mess. With a third of traffic using that ill-conceived mobile view, of course the ad revenue is going to take a crap. I think we've made the adjustments on PB that will help to correct for this, but it's too early to tell (that, and December is the slowest month of the year).
I can't do anything about CPM's, and I don't want to enable a crappy user experience just for ad views, so I can see where a little focused energy will likely improve the situation. As is generally the case, I just need to find time. It's a fun hobby, but it's not my only one. I do have to accept though that if I have too many years in a row where I'm not putting energy into it, traffic differences won't be minor. As I said, maybe I'll be more into it now that I'm back out of the fold.
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