Ad revenue for CoasterBuzz and PointBuzz took a real dump last year. It hit a new low in January, reaching only $156, and that's before sending Walt's share (he's my partner on PB). Google switched to a CPM (cost-per-thousand) model in February, meaning that you get paid for showing the ad, whether it ever gets clicked on or not. That's far better than CPC (cost-per-click), which always seemed terrible for publishers and great for advertisers. Even if you don't click, for serious brands, they're getting seen, just as they would on TV or in print.
The sites together generally show 20,000 to 30,000 ads per day. You can see then that if the rate was consistently $1 CPM, I'd make $20 in a day, which is $600 in a month. That's a long way from the two grand I'd make back in the day, but fortunately my costs are no longer a grand per month, and I don't need the money to pay the mortgage. Lately, the effective CPM is in the high 70-cent range, putting me around $400 per month. This puts it firmly in the category of "meh," but it's an improvement anyway. At least I'm not subsidizing the sites out of pocket.
I outlined the costs last year, and now that I'm redundant on the primary site, my costs are around $260/month. I know that some people ask why I have the redundancy and that high of a cost when there are cheaper alternatives, and it's a valid point. However, given my line of work, I care about everything being fast and up, and this buys that. I've had a dedicated server die before, and another time a fire in the data center knocked me off the air. After 25 years, you're bound to see bad things happen. Besides, consistent uptime and speed reflects better on your Google juice, and the long-tail value of having tens of thousands of indexed pages is the reason that the sites still get the traffic that they do in the age of everything-is-on-big-tech-platforms.
Heading into an election season, there is typically a little boost in revenue, though in 2020 I didn't see it. The 2022 midterms were actually stronger. I don't take Trump's money, but the weird thing (everything is "weird" about the GOP these days) is that he's not running a lot of campaigns anyway. The only thing I see is some random campaigns from backwater towns in Michigan running for state representatives, not selling policy, but being "100% pro-Trump." That's sad. It's like pitching yourself for a job by saying you 100% back your local sportsball team.
I hate the Google monopoly on ads, but there isn't much I can do about it. Fortunately there's still a core group of people who pay for CoasterBuzz memberships, just for the ad-free experience. There's more money in video, but that's a lot of work, and I'm not that interested in feeding that algorithm constantly. I see how exhausting it is for others, and I don't need that.
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