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:

£1 per point to a charity of my choice for this article's Altmetric score by Christmas (driven by tweets and RTs of the link)

T&Cs in next tweet
https://t.co/3oawAsRKeV

— Professor Paul Cairney (@CairneyPaul) December 1, 2018

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)

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.