I haven’t done one of these in a long time.
The last I can recall (well… Google) was for May last year (link.)
In that time we suffered the great server problem of 2009 (it’s probably not completely unrelated that less than a month after the worst was over (and it went on for months) I lost my marriage), we’ve seen highs and low, good money months and not so good.
The good news is that today we remain on track, although we’ve never quite broken through the targets we once set ourselves.
Our stats since May run between being 20k short of 3m pv, and 60k over 2m pv, and everything in between. Our income ranges from just scraping to be profitable, to having a record month, and a following month that I won’t complain about at all.
Despite my personal issues at home (see above) the team has stuck by me despite days where I occasionally struggled to function, and I can never be more grateful.
Indeed, if there’s one highlight over the last 10 mths is (mostly) how stable the writing team has been.
January was particularly slow for us, but we still managed to keep things over 2m pv, and we started to pick up in the last week. $ Stats this year (after a bumper Nov-Dec) are down (as they were the same time last year) but the balance is better now: even in a rough month we can still break even, and even afford a small payment to me. Despite the personal issues, I’ve started trying to balance out the good and bad months in accounting to allow for both, and it’s starting to work well; even if we start going backwards (unlikely, we’ve never booked an actual loss since Dec 08) we’ve got a permanent buffer now, and we’re not losing money, an important consideration.
We’ve had a problem with an external content provider that remains unresolved at the time of writing, so change might be afoot there, but the rest goes well. Hell, we even had a writer at CES this year covering stuff for us, and that to me was one of the things I always wanted to do.
Our head count sits at 6 + 1 occasional writer + 2 assistants (one who posts syndicated content, one who does admin) = 9.
I’ve always had visions of expansion but given the non-site issues I’m quite happy to continue sitting where we are now, at least until I get fully back up on my feet. We’ve turned around a minor slump, are focused going forward, and there’s no reason why we can’t get back to passing the magic 3m pv goal and beyond. For the next 6 mths though, it’s a conservative ploy, but who knows.
Hopefully the team is happy, and although I have my days, I’m still one of the luckiest guys in blogging, and a lot of that is thanks to the team. Every now and then I still can’t believe we do what we do, but we do, and although we might not be the biggest site, we power on and we’ve carved out our space on the internet, for better or worse.
