The author, Dan Luu, initially explored blog monetization through ads, finding the potential revenue low and outweighed by concerns like reduced traffic and privacy. Despite these initial reservations and a negative experience with an ad network, a later analysis of increased traffic and alternative monetization models (like direct ads or Patreon) revealed a significant, previously underestimated income potential, leading to a re-evaluation of his stance.
Every atomic assertion extracted from the underlying record, ranked by evidence strength.
About 40% of the author's traffic uses an ad blocker.
Statcounter claims Jeff Atwood's blog had 78,000 hits from October 21 to January 21.
Google Analytics showed 94,000 users on the author's blog in the past 30 days.
The author of Slate Star Codex claims to get 10,000 to 20,000 impressions per day.
About 17% of the author's traffic blocks Google Analytics.
Google Analytics showed 118,000 sessions on the author's blog in the past 30 days.
Google Analytics showed 143,000 page views on the author's blog in the past 30 days.
According to Alexa, the author's blog is ranked at 162,000.
Slate Star Codex charges $1250 for 6 months of ads.
It seems irrational to leave $90k per year on the table because it seems like a hassle.
Jeff Atwood's best month saw 1.7 million hits.
According to Alexa, Coding Horror is ranked at 22,000.
Casey Muratori, ESR, and eevee are pulling in around $1000 per month from crowdfunding.
Statcounter claims the author's blog had 298,000 hits from October 21 to January 21.
143,000 page views per month at a $1 CPM would generate $143 per month.
The author's blog traffic is roughly 2.3 million hits per month as of October 25th, 2016.
Scaling Slate Star Codex's revenue linearly, the author could potentially make $100k per year.
The author removed the ad after Carbon failed to send a payment after the first payment.
Cloudflare tends to show about 20% higher traffic than Google Analytics.
$143 per month seems like a good guess for an upper bound of income.
Benchmarking studies on ad impact may not generalize to other sites without deep domain understanding.
If the author stops blogging, his traffic level drops to pretty much zero.
The author's traffic distribution resulted in a surge of traffic over a specific 30-day period.
Alexa is theoretically supposed to show how popular a site was over the past three months.
Coding Horror should have substantially more than 7x the author's traffic based on Alexa rankings.
The author paused blogging from April to October.
Alexa's sub-metrics are inconsistent and nonsensical.
Coding Horror, a blog by Jeff Atwood, is one of the most widely read programming blogs.
Jeff Atwood makes his traffic stats available.
The author has never had a calendar month with 143,000 traffic.
Studies exist on the impact of ads on site usage and behavior.
Running ads on the blog has both pros and cons.
The 143,000 hits over a 30-day period seemed like a fluke.
$143 per month would equate to $1,700 per year.
The potential money from ads will never be enough to make a living off of.
The percentage of people using ad blockers continues to increase.
CPM (cost per thousand impressions) is down something like 5x since the 1990s.
Mid-level positions at big companies pay total compensation that is 8x-9x the median income in the U.S. when the programming job market is hot.
A current standard figure for CPM (cost per thousand impressions) is $1.
The potential money from ads is not enough to make a living off of.
The ability to gather data on the impact of ads on site usage and behavior is a benefit of running ads.
Premium ads can achieve well over an order of magnitude higher CPM.
Sponsorships can fetch an even better return than premium ads.
To get premium ads, a publisher needs to appeal to specific advertisers.
The author doubts it's worth the effort to find specific advertisers unless traffic reaches Jeff Atwood levels.
Many people use Alexa rankings as a gold standard for site popularity.
$600 per month after taxes would have approximately covered the author's rent when he lived in Austin.
$600 per month seems like a hard and probably unreachable upper bound for sustainable income for the author.
The author expects to average much less traffic than the reported 30-day figures.
Traffic is more than linear in Alexa rank.
The author cannot get as much traffic as someone who blogs about more general interest topics.
The author blogs about obscure topics like Intel instructions for non-volatile storage.
The author's reported traffic numbers were pretty unusual.
The Alexa ranks for the author's and Jeff Atwood's sites seem way off compared to direct measurements.
Running ads and conducting A/B testing would allow the author to observe the effect on his own site.
An Alexa graph showed the author's site below average in every category, which should be impossible for a relative ranking.
The amount of traffic reduction from ads depends on both the site and the ads.
A study by Daniel G. Goldstein, Siddharth Suri, R. Preston McAfee, Matthew Ekstrand-Abueg, and Fernando Diaz attempts to quantify the cost of ads.
It is well known that adding ads reduces traffic and affects long-term user behavior.
Jeff Atwood blogs about general interest programming topics like Markdown and Ruby.