How was your Dec and or 2005?

[Chris]

Well... I won't know anything for 2005 for atleast a couple weeks. It takes awhile to get all the numbers in and figured out.

December though.... my most popular item was sold out on my sword site and yet I still managed to match Dec 2004 sales. Considering LOTR is one more year gone this was suprising to me, and it bodes well for the future. Had my most popular item (and a couple other items) been in stock I would have passed 2004 sales. Overally I expect ecommerce revenue to be up atleast 10% over 2004.

For advertising revenue... Adsense was down 10% from Nov (but with low holiday traffic that is to be expected). Burst was up around 40% -- I attribute that to the microbar campaign I mentioned before, and and increase in rates. The other networks seemed to mirror Adsense's 10% decline.

Affiliate revenue, other than amazon, was suprisingly low. Datafeed sites were extremely poor performers considering it was the christmas season. My datafeed server had some issues though and so that could account for some of it.

Overall non-ecommerce revenue was down, as to be expected.

For 2005 on the year though I think I did atleast 30% better than 2004, which is quite a bit of money.

[r2d2]

Income was down for December compared to previous months. Due mainly to people being busy with Christmas, not looking at buying houses I think. Adsense down about 15%.

Compared to 2004 though, 2005 is up probably about 600% :) Due to my sites not really getting going till about September 04.

[chromate]

2005 not so great for me. Basically, everything apart from fastclick and casale was down on 2004.

My datafeed sites have been generating next to nothing over the past 3 or so months. I just can't be bothered with them any more. As a worst case they could even become detrimental to my network of sites. We all knew that they wouldn't last, and I think their time has now come, unless you're willing to create some feature out of them or something. But I think any effort / Google PR is better placed elsewhere. So I'm not renewing the domains, apart from lcd-monitors.net. So if you still have link exchanges with my kitchen datafeed sites Chris, drop them.

Traffic to my diet sites has shot up since the 27th. It's a motivational boost to see what that can do in terms of income! :) For instance, yesterday I made 9 South Beach Diet Online subscription sales. That's about $150 worth of affiliate income for that program alone. Add other affiliate programs and good advertising revenue into the mix and that's some nice income for the day. It's been like that for the past few days. Nice.

I wish a prosperous 2006 for everyone here!! :)

[r2d2]

Ok, thanks for that Rich.

My non AWS data feed site is pretty lame too - 1 order in over six months :) AWS are still worth keeping though.

[Shawn]

Chromate, the reason your affiliate sales for your southbeach diet site are doing so well is because you were featured on the homepage of Yahoo.

[Shawn]

(Seriously).

[tommy_boy]

"Considering LOTR is one more year gone this was suprising to me, and it bodes well for the future."

I am surprised to hear this also.

[Todd W]

Dec. best month. of 05.

2005 better than 2006 by about 50% profit increase.

[chromate]

Chromate, the reason your affiliate sales for your southbeach diet site are doing so well is because you were featured on the homepage of Yahoo.

Wow. Featured? Where abouts on the homepage?

I'm not sure that's the sole reason though. I got a load of rankings back on Google. Maybe Googlebot picked up on the link from Yahoo and I received some kind of ranking boost because of it. My traffic is as good today as it was yesterday, if not better, and my logs show no traffic from the Yahoo homepage. :confused: Oh well, who's complaining ;)

EDIT: Oops. Okay, I realise now that Shawn was being sarcastic. I couldn't understand why they would feature one of my sites anyway. :) I hope my other post didn't sound like I was boasting. I was just excited after checking my stats and since we were talking about revenue for december and the rest of the year... well...

[chromate]

Ok, thanks for that Rich.

My non AWS data feed site is pretty lame too - 1 order in over six months :) AWS are still worth keeping though.

I think you advertise as well don't you? Some AWS sites can still work well with adwords ads etc. But I just don't have any luck with organic search engine traffic to my AWS sites anymore, and I'm not prepared to send them any PR as I'd rather send it elsewhere.

[Cutter]

December I had no gains, there was a little drop off in revenue from November. Judging by how the past week has been, things are going to come back strong for January. I've got a new site thats been up for about a week and I haven't put any ads on it yet, or done any heavy promotion.

The best way to fight the down trend.. keep building and growing!

[r2d2]

I think you advertise as well don't you? Some AWS sites can still work well with adwords ads etc.

Yes, sorry, I probably should have said a significant part of the income comes from Adsense :)

[Masetek]

Well december has been my most profitable month ever by far. 2 new sites got completely spidered by google at the start of the month and got some (surprisingly) good rankings. Clickbank revenue went from pretty much nothing to top my adsense earnings. Adsense itself more than doubled (because of the 2 new sites). I also do 2 big freelance jobs so this helps, my name has got around now and loads of freelance work is coming it which is good. So Im pretty happy with dec, and the last 1/2 of last year.

Bring on 06!

[Shawn]

Chromate, on the homepage of Yahoo, there is a "buzz log" section. Recently, it showed popular diet searches -- with "southbeach diet" being one of them. You were on the first page, which is how you probably received a good amount of visitors.

[chromate]

Oh I see. I thought you were being sarcastic. Sorry :)

[James]

I got a lovely boost from about $8.00 a day to $15-20 a day between Christmas Eve and now with AdSense.

My datafeed sites have been horrible; I'm considering dropping them.

[AndyH]

Dec was the same as I have been making for the last 6 months. Which is great, more than I need to live and pay off the home loan i'll have soon. However, this year is going to be big for me. I am going to be releasing my next game which will be the biggest yet and I will finally get around to hellbored.com.

As for '05 as a whole. I was actually doing my tax new years eve - sounds fun right? Nearly 200k profit. Probably the last time I will be showing actual figures :).

[Kyle]

Pretty horrible. My main website, www.surviveoutdoors.com, has been obviously penalized by Google. I'm still working on figuring out what the issue is. We have like 16 great DMOZ listings now, but our rankings on these DMOZ listed articles are in the gutter.

2006 is looking absolutely insane though. I've started up an adult gaming site last month, and it's already growing faster than anything else i've done. Adult gaming is getting big, both free flash games and pay per month sites.

[Chris]

by adult gaming, you mean like porn but interactive? Or just something catered to adults instead of kids?

[Kyle]

I guess the right terminology is interactive porn, and some flash games for adults.

[chromate]

Pretty horrible. My main website, www.surviveoutdoors.com, has been obviously penalized by Google. I'm still working on figuring out what the issue is. We have like 16 great DMOZ listings now, but our rankings on these DMOZ listed articles are in the gutter.

Duplicate content penalty maybe? Where does your content come from? There are other sites with the same content. http://maineiceanglers.org/safety.html for example.

[s2kinteg916]

Icebane have you ever looked into starting a forum for your website ?

is surviveoutdoors and http://www.firstaidkits.org/ on the same ip ? as well as kylewillaims.com ?

[Kyle]

All of our content is completely orignal. Anyone else using our content is doing so illegally.

We have different IPs for everything.

Chromate.. thats very interesting.

[Kyle]

When searching on our opening sentence on that article in quotes, we are near the bottom of the list.

Christ...

[agua]

We have different IPs for everything. Do different IPs matter?

[Cutter]

Its questionable. Perhaps if you have a lot of similar sites with heavy interlinking.

[cameron]

2005 was by far my best year. The nice thing about it is it's also probably the year that I did the least work. I love how my past efforts are still paying off.

This year is off to a good start too. I redesigned my gaming site the other day and my clickthrough rate has gone from about 1.7% to 5.0%. I plan on doing the same with some of my other sites. At that point I'll probably be making enough to live off of (living like a poor student though).

[mails]

My earnings for December 2005 were only average, but that's because I'm doing so much more otger things and have too little time to update my sites depending only on AdSense....

But anyaway, I'm going to improve my AdSense 'drive' sites these months so I hope for better....

Mails