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.
- CIDER
- Calva
- Nim
- Abo-Abo - One of my favorite developers. My life revolves around his emacs packages, almost literally.
- Ardour
- Child’s Play
- Charity Music
- Rich Hickey
- ReaperBlog
- Settings Sync - I used this for 6 months and I’ll forever be trying to make emacs device syncing work with such simplicity.
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:
- Cubase 10.5 - Article not published. - $59.99
- Drum Dial - Article - $56
- Veritas Dowel Maker - Article - $385
- Kali Audio LP-8 - Article - $399
- Waveform 10 - Article - $199 (upgrade)
Total Spent - $1,098.99
Hosting Costs
$450.12
Other Site Related
Items that I purchased to use for making content and the prices that I paid:
- Panasonic G9 with accessories kit and lens (actual listing unavailable) - $2,233.25
- Panasonic 30mm Macro Lens - $297.99
- Vello Deluxe Extension Tubes - $79.95
- Mitakon Zhongyi 20mm Lens $139
- Mitakon Zhongyi 25mm lens - $299
- Sony UWP-D11 Wireless Lav - $349.99
- Olympus 45mm Lens - $249
- Proxxon Micro Compound Table - $79.99
- Camera Clamps * $23.99 * 2
- Portable Drive - $149.99
- Video Lights - $142.99
- Video Lights - $139.99
Total Spent - $4,209.12
Other Personal
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.