Studio Rockstar

It’s just about that time to sit back and take inventory of all of my sites, where they are, and where they’re going. Due to identity issues, I won’t disclose the exact site names, but I’ll refer to them by code names laid out in this post from now on.

Project W

Project W is a blog that I’ve had for about 3 years now. It’s always teetered on the point of being a personal blog, and being a professional web design blog. I recently redesigned it, and the sole focus is on web development and my interests (music, games, etc). Personally, this is the site I have the most emotional attachment to. About a year and half ago i decided to attempt to start monetizing it. Even though it receives only moderate traffic, it’s one of my best money-makers to date.

Revenue Sources

Program	Months Active	Monthly Revenue	YTD Revenue
DreamHost	18	$350	$6,356
Text Link Ads	4	$250	$768.13

Traffic

Right now, the site gets around 20,000 unique visitors and 50,000 pageviews a month. It has around 1,700 RSS subscribers as well.

Project T

This site is very strange — it’s a site about a video game that I created very quickly (literally from start to finish in under 15 hours). Since then, I really haven’t touched the base of site, aside from moderating the forums and posting a few news items. It’s running Wordpress and has a punbb forum attached. However, the site has exploded with activity. It’s currently bringing in a ton of traffic for me, but I’ve yet to sit down and even try and monetize it thus far. It’s got some very minimal Adsense placements, and that’s about it for now. Also note I just very recently put Adsense to use…

The wordpress posts generally get about 20-200 comments now with the highest comment count nearly 300 on one post. The forum has around 1,300 users and 30,000 posts. I know it’s not touching any of the big boards yet — but I also might suggest that this is about a game that’s not even released yet. I’ve got high hopes for this site, and the traffic just keeps climbing month after month.

Revenue Sources

Program	Months Active	Monthly Revenue	YTD Revenue
Adsense	3	$50	$132.54

Traffic

The traffic for this site is hovering around 150,000 pageviews a month, bringing in around 20,000 unique visitors. The great thing about this site is it’s high visibility in search engines. It’s currently the only fan site on page #1 when you search for the game title. As popularity for the game rise, so will the traffic.

Project P

Project P is actually a partnership I’m involved with. It’s with one of my best friends from back in High School. He handles the community, I handle the code and design. I designed and built this site from scratch myself. It’s a community-based site built in Ruby on Rails. This is one of those sites I really hope takes off because I think it’s a legitimately great idea.

Revenue Sources

N/A at present. I haven’t tried to monetize this site yet — I’ve maybe made a grand total of about $20 off it so far.

Traffic

Right now the site is pulling in around 55,000 pageviews a month with 15,000 unique visitors a month.

Project C

Project C is a super-secret startup I’m involved with 3 other guys with. It’s online video related, and coming very soon. Huge hopes for this one.

Other Sites

The four projects listed above are my only real “active” projects at the time being. I’ve got a lot of them that are either on hold, or have been disbanded in the interest of saving my time.

• Project D — A community/news site about drumming. This was once fairly popular and was bringing in about $100/mo from affiliate sales. But right now it’s completely deactivated. Too hard to find good content.
• Project H — A hosting site that… eh, was about 8 hours of effort, but didn’t turn out to be that great. It’s still live, but not bringing in any traffic or am I promoting it.

Conclusion

So when it all ads up, I’m making around $650 a month ($21.67/day) passive income right now. Nothing to brag about — but it’s pretty cool to be able to say I pay my rent with my online ventures. I figure that living in California, in order to not have a job, I’ll need to make $2,500 a month off my sites (taxes are a bitch). So I’m 25% to my goal. Here’s to the future ahead!