Gafoo’s Blog

This is kinda cool. I was getting some finance stuff done tonight in preparation for doing taxes and for the first time I was looking at online ad revenues to see if I would need to claim them on my taxes. It was a pipe dream for this year as the minimum necessary is $600 to require any sort of official documents in my taxes however that may not hold true for next year…

I did a quick analysis on my ad revenue for Parking Lot Sounds.com and Revver.com. They both have really good export functionality to quickly gather all your data in an excel file for manipulation off-line. I used January as a baseline since this is typically the slowest month for visitors to the site. There is not much going on in the world of marching percussion in January as winter drum lines are still at least a month away from doing shows and drum corps are still in audition modes. That actually why I am doing so many updates to the site right now. I don’t have to be buried in a video editor getting videos site-ready.

Anyway…

Assuming no traffic dips and no traffic spikes (again…a baseline estimate), I can expect to earn just over $600 in advertising revenue this year. The really cool thing is that I will probably wind up making much more as the marching percussion stuff comes in waves and last season I saw huge spikes in traffic and ad clicks during the summer. I served more than a terabyte of videos last year. Plus since joining Revver.com and placing those videos on the site (during the slow months) I already have well over 20,000 video views. Hell, the podcast that I run is up to 12,000 downloads (about 500 a week) and that was started just this past summer.

I have gotten a little more savvy as to how to distribute videos. The cool thing about the marching percussion community is that repeat viewings are REALLY high compared to most viral video. So I have begun to stagger the release of the downloadable content in favor of making the users use the revver player thus ensuring a higher volume of CPM ad views. I think the next wave of improvements on this front would be to start a pay for content site similar to what Diggnation did when it first started out. You would pay a fee (like $5) in exchange for receiving the Diggnation podcast a few days early. I think I want to try the same thing but I have to look into running some sort of protection software on the server itself. The kind that mask the url and create virtual folders that are time sensitive. Plus, I am not sure but in order to do this, I might have to move up to a dedicated rack server instead of a shared hosting plan. Either way, it’s definitely a long way off.

So, over $600 for a year may not seem like much but I always put it into a perspective that makes sense for what it is…
$600 = my hosting bill for the year + my internet bill for the year + cost of video tapes to shoot these videos…
Now that I have acheived my small goal for Parking Lot Sounds.com maybe I can make it an even bigger goal. Something like…
(Yearly ad revenue) = my hosting bill for the year + my internet bill for the year + cost of video tapes + cost of a new editing computer + new High Def camera. Wouldn’t that be the ultimate?!