Monetizing my website

Update December 2018

I kept two silly metrics going this year (while – genuinely – forgetting about the 3p thing in the original post), so it’s £276 (just in case) from this site and £288 from this offer:

I gave the £554 to Hope not Hate. Again, please feel free to set up your own website if you’d like to comment on my choice.

If you’ve come this far, I’d like you to indulge my obsession with the stats on this site (e.g. help me to put my fingers in my ears and shout La La La a lot, to avoid someone telling me that web-traffic stats are no more reliable than the weather):

  1. Please note how frustrating will be the overall number on the 31st December
  2. September 2014 was – at the time – an outlier (#indyref)
  3. Please note the eventual tipping point between (a) traffic from my twitter feed , followed eventually by (b) traffic from search engines
  4. The busy periods pretty much coincide with the semesters in Universities (and the most viewed posts are 1000 Words)

all time views 998kall time views per day up to 2018all time views up to 2018 number2013 to 18 stats

Original post December 2017

This could go very wrong, but hubris has taken me this far in life. I’ve decided to monetize my website in a nicer way than ‘monetize your website’ seems to suggest. For every 1000 hits, I’ll give £1 to a good cause.

Assuming that my blog only ever reaches ‘cult status’ and people keep buying expensive academic books, I can cover the donation comfortably with royalties. The worst that can go wrong is that my website starts to do very well indeed and it costs a bit more, but that outcome doesn’t seem like a likely or bad thing right now.

I made a £724 donation to Women on Waves (please feel free to set up your own blog to share your views on my choice) on the assumption that my all time hits will trickle into 724k by the end of the year.

I’ll make the donation once per year. If my website stays at around 200k per year, and the price of Toffifee doesn’t rocket after Bexit, I’ll treble the rate of donation to 3p per 1000. Then let’s see how it goes.

1 Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

One response to “Monetizing my website

  1. Reblogged this on Paul Cairney: Politics & Public Policy and commented:

    Updated for 2018

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s