While much of the general soul searching I do surrounding work leads me to believe that money is not the most important factor when choosing what to do with your life, there's no way to deny that it does matter. Every moment you're working you're not recreating, so there should be some cost associated with that. In a perfect world that means that you should enjoy your work, but even in the best case scenario, it's not likely that you enjoy yourself at all times. I've been close, but not to the extent that some of my friends that have enjoyed their jobs.
That got me to thinking, especially since it is my job right now, what do I really make running my Web sites, down to an hourly basis? Is it worth my time? The answer is probably yes regardless, since I enjoy it most of the time.
There are two ways to really look at it. The first is to decide that many of your expenses are things you'd buy anyway, which in my case means computers, cameras and such. Sprinkle in some travel as well, which is often an expense to run events or collect photos or whatever. Approaching it that way, and taking into consideration last year's time spent rebuilding CoasterBuzz as well as normal weekly duties and the podcast, it was a moderately busy year. Now take all the revenue and only deduct the monthly expenses like the Web server and Internet connection. In that case, it works out to around $40 an hour for my time. That's not quite the consulting rates I've had in previous jobs, but it's not bad either.
The problem is that not deducting expenses like computers and cameras requires having a regular day job. Suddenly the story isn't nearly as good then. It means the actual take-home is more like $10 an hour. Again, I enjoy it, so it's still worth it to me.
The good news is that this scales well. In a year that I'm not rebuilding a site, I doubt I spend more than 250 hours working on the sites, which is a far cry from the 2,080 hours of a normal working year (not counting in vacations and holidays). If I spent more time on it, producing more sites and more content, the expenses don't change, unless I need more hardware for higher traffic.
This line of thinking inevitably leads to me asking why I haven't gone full throttle to do it. The answer always comes back to the volatility of the ad market. It's completely out of my control. In mid-2001 I was flying high with DoubleClick writing me checks, sometimes as high as $2,000 a month. Still not quite mortgage and car money (unless you don't eat), but not bad. Granted, expenses back then were also much higher, on the order of a grand a month. But then DoubleClick bailed and I was nearly screwed. That's when CoasterBuzz Club was born, to keep me from losing my shirt.
Expenses are much lower these days, but ad revenue changes monthly, and not in relation to traffic. April was decent, but it's the first truly decent month I've had in a year, and mostly because Federated Media has thankfully been running some sweet run-of-network campaigns. As is often the case, they could disappear at any time.
This is one of the reasons I'm such a fan of 37signals, because they're building online apps with renewable revenue that customers actually pay for. That's where there is a make-a-living opportunity. The challenge is finding something that isn't already being given away for free, or so ridiculously better than the free stuff that it's worth it (think PlentyOfFish vs. eHarmony).
One of the other things that I suppose keeps me from really committing to that path is that I like working with smart people, and it's actually easier to work for someone else. Twice in the last year people waved dollars in my face, though I should've known what the outcome was as soon as I learned the true nature of their businesses. So the trade off is that it's easier to make money, but entirely dependent on the ability (or inability) of someone else to run a business. It's surprisingly like the ad market in that respect.
All of that being said, there's no doubt I'll continue to do these sites, and a few more before too long. Day job or not, I like spending time on them, no matter what they're worth.
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