Next month I have to choose a renewal term for the reserved resource instances that CoasterBuzz and PointBuzz run on. For that part of the expense, I can save about 55% per month if I commit to three years. A year ago, I committed to one year for 35% off, but that was after updating from the basic tier to the premium tier, which was necessary because of the increased load. In any case, the three-year scenario reduces cost by about $62 per month, or $744 a year. It also gets me back in line with what I was paying for the basic tier, which has less memory. And all of it is cheaper than when it was on Windows instead of Linux, which I switched a few years ago.
Both sites saw an increase in traffic overall last year, and I was starting to have intermittent memory issues, which is why I scaled up to the bigger instance and one-year commitment. My total costs are about $300 per month, and if I do the three-year, it'll be closer to $260. People say, "But you can get a site for [this much] with [some service]." They're not wrong, but given my line of work, and the fact that there are I think 16 different sites/apps running, making all of that robust isn't free. Everything is redundant and resilient, there's caching, there are off-app background jobs, an Elastic index for search, etc. Being cloud-based, I can scale all the parts up as needed without redeploying anything, too. And I'm pretty proud of the fact that average response times are under 20ms.
Believe it or not, there was a time when ad revenue (and club memberships) grossed as much as $2,000 per month, and with way less traffic (that's about $3,300 in today's dollars). Those were the days! That's why I didn't bother working consistently in 2004 and 2005, and wrote a programming book and did some volleyball coaching in that time. Because of the Google ad monopoly, there is no real competition, and there are more sites than ads that can be shown. The economics completely suck now for independent publishers. Video is probably worse, because it's also Google (YouTube), a single platform that won't even write you a check without a certain threshold of subscribers and watch time, meaning that there's an enormous long-tail of people posting their stuff while Google keeps the money.
Prior to the pandemic, for a decade, ad revenue varied seasonally, but generally fell between $500 and $900 each month, which was more than enough to cover the costs. Then 2020 hit, and it took a momentary dump, before recovering later in the year. 2022 came down though, in half, with a range of $250 to $450, then 2023 went down to $180 to $380. 2024 recovered a little, but then this year hasn't even hit $300. And keep in mind, my PointBuzz partner Walt gets half of the PB share. And this is while CB page views are up an insane 77% this year, though I don't know how much of that is robots, because the analytics also say that users are up 400%. PB page views are down about a third, but I don't really trust Google with any of these numbers. So it's a pretty sad state of affairs these days.
So with the upcoming renewal, and just being in midlife, the question popped into my head... how much longer do I do this? I started PB (then Guide to The Point) in 1998, and CB in 2000, so I've been doing this for a very, very long time. A number of regulars to the sites have died over the years. I went to a wedding some years ago where we realized that many of us met because of the sites. We did a few hundred podcast episodes before it was cool. I interviewed CEO's and industry legends. I went to a ton of media events. I've made so many friends, scattered about the country. We had a ton of events back in the day. I hosted other coaster sites for free for awhile. By most measures, the best days are behind us.
Then fold in the fact that I'm just not into any of it the way that I used to be. I don't want to use working at SeaWorld as an inflection point, because it's too close in time to the life reboot with a new-ish child and marriage. Priorities changed quite a bit. I live next door to arguably the best theme parks in the world, and mostly go to them to eat and drink. Industry consolidation hasn't been great for quality (see: Six Flags/Cedar Fair). Honestly there aren't many rides that are truly unique, and those that are (Guardians, Velocicoaster, Hagrid's) are here. The idea of traveling for the purpose of riding does not appeal to me, not when I can go places and see historic things. When I engage on the sites, it's mostly about the business of the industry, and sometimes about technology. A lot of the site regulars are in the same boat.
With all of that said, it's not that all of this doesn't serve me. Maintaining the forum app is something that I enjoy, even though there are fewer and fewer things I feel like I need to do with it. Without a "real world" application for it, I probably wouldn't maintain it. All of that infrastructure, which has a ton of available overhead, can also host whatever stuff I want to mess around with, at no additional cost. My personal music cloud runs on it. This blog runs on it, too. In a way, I'm subsidizing an Internet technology playground for myself. That is valuable to me. I don't mind sticking with it for a few more years. I'm also too stubborn to cede yet another community (or two) to the platforms. The audience that sticks around finds value in it, and prefers it to the platforms. I'm not exactly sticking it to Zuck, but it's something.
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