2019 in Review
2019 in Review

I wanted to take some time to discuss what I did on this website in 2019, talk about donations/contributions and discuss what I spend donation/patreon money on.

Plus some goals and ideas, I suppose.

Let’s get to it.

Contents

Finances

Patreon

(Output from Patreon reports csv->sheets)

In 2019 I received $1,535.29 from Patreon in 2019, with a total gross of $1,692.72.

$72.74 in processing fees, and $84.69 to patreon.

Direct Donations

(Output from Paypal transaction reports, filtered lines not containing “Donation”. csv->sheets)

I received $1095.99 from paypal after fees. $1,155.50 in gross was sent, and $59.51 in fees were taken out.

Gross Stuff

Ads

Estimated Monthly POTENTIAL earnings from 2 ads per page: $1,204-$3,500 (based on a variety of estimators and my current site stats). Yearly estimate: $14,448.00-42,000

ACTUAL AD REVENUE: $0.00

Placement opportunities

Total Offered Placement Opportunities: $5,700.00 (direct payment or product)

ACTUAL PLACEMENT REVENUE: $0.00

Total Opportunity lost

Total Ad/Placement Opportunity Value Turned Down: ~$20,148.00 (low estimate)

I HATE ADS. I will never put them on my website. No affiliate links. No sponsored placement. I will always note if a product was acquired without normal payment, and I always purchase products that I decide to continue using after a review.

Totals

$2,848.22 in total donations.

$216.94 in fees.

Earnings after fees: $2,631.28

Spending

Support

I supported the following entities with monthly or one-time donations (I will not disclose the amounts, sorry). Many of these donations I make anonymously.

Total Spent - Pfft. As if I’m going to disclose charitable/support giving. The actual total will not be disclosed in further calculations so that clever people can’t figure out the value. I believe Rich Hickey and Cider are the only public contributions that I make.

Purchases for Articles

Subjects

I purchased the following items to use as the subject for an article:

Total Spent - $1,098.99

Hosting Costs

$450.12

Items that I purchased to use for making content and the prices that I paid:

Total Spent - $4,209.12

Other Personal

Bass Stuff
Bass Stuff

I purchased an Aguilar DB115 and DB410 for myself partially utilizing some donation/patreon funds.

Thank you!

Food

I purchased $512.00 of food in 2019 that was eaten while working on content for this website.

(I round up my tips at dining establishments so that my running total is always even.)

Net Totals

Total Earned: $2,631.28

Total Spent: $8,251.88

Net Gain: $-5,520.6

Content

Time spent

I opened Dired Plus, marked files matching the regex 2019, ran grep <files> -nHoh --null -e '([0-9]*) hours' on the marked files with dired-do-grep (bound to C-M-g) and then I manually removed eroneous results.

I use Time Sink to keep track of how much time I spend in specific software, and I use OmniFocus to schedule my time fairly strictly. My time estimates are accurate to within 30 minutes per article.

I spent 1,277 hours writing/researching/editing/etc… on articles for this website in 2019. I wrote 65 articles of some sort.

Average of 24.6 hours spent per week.

Average of 1.25 articles per week.

Written

Marked files in Dired Plus containing 2019 in the file name. Ran shell command (!) cat * | wc with the options -l for lines, -w for words and -m for characters. This method does include some templating content, but I estimated (based on actual posts) that this accounts for <1% of characters counted.

I wrote 14,908 lines of text here in 2019.

131,985 words were written. (A “Novel” is generally 40,000 words).

894,889 characters. Average of 6.78 characters per word.

Hourly Rate

Before spending, I made approximately $2.06 per hour writing for this website.

After spending, I SPENT (“lost”) approximately $4.32 per hour writing for this website.

2020 Goals

Goals for 2020 -

  • Write fewer articles - I felt that there was an occasional decline in quality in 2019 due to my declining health, lack of ideas and my growing discontentment with writing.
  • Write higher quality articles - I would like to increase the depth that I go into in content. I also wish to improve the quality of included media.
  • Improve Accessibility - More accessibility improvements!
  • Re-vamp The DAW Chart - I’ve had ideas of doing this with Datomic and switching to a dynamic system (rather than static system built locally and deployed).
    • New UI ideas?
  • More programming and electronics articles tied in to music topics.
    • Fewer reviews.
  • More woodworking projects related to music and computer use.
  • Continue to improve mobile experience - I’ll be working on this tomorrow.

2020 Ideas

  • Music/Mixing Tutorials?
  • New backend system? (finally finish my own site generator? maybe?)
  • Review a Windows DAW?
  • 30 days doing X… where X isn’t a review.

I have about 30 specific article ideas written down. Maybe half are feasible. That list grows and shrinks with high frequency, so it could very well be 80 ideas in a week or 10 :)

Conclusion

Thanks for reading! I hope this gave you some insight into the site and what your contributions help me do.

Meta

This post took 7 hours to research, write and edit.