2009 / January 5^th/ Side project profitability

Side projects are the small businesses of the web — the little projects people put their blood, sweat & tears into. Many side projects downright fail, some succeed wildly, and the rest just kind of sit there. I’ve been launching my own little side projects since early 2004 (and trying to create them since around 2000). I’ve had a wide range of successes and failures profit-wise making up 4%-25% of my yearly income.

Snook was talking on twitter about this post which went over his side projects, and I thought it’d be cool to post mine here. I’ve always been afraid (irrationally) about job security in the past when posting about the profit-side of my side-projects. But that’s not really a problem or concern of mine now, so here goes.

Disclaimer: many of these sites are now dead and the links will break. You can see most of them through the wayback machine if you’re curious

The Losers

Poetry with meaning

Poetry with meaning hasn’t made me a damn dime, and I don’t think I really care. The primary reason for this is that there’s no way to make money off the site. It’s been growing slowly since launch in 2005 and I’m currently working on the 3rd iteration of Rails code. It was the first site I wrote using Rails (0.8) and helped me learn Ruby.

The Hostr

The Hostr was a crazy site I built in one night to post about hosting sites. It sat around for a few months, never really got any traffic, and eventually got completely overrun by spam and bots. Effectively no profit.

The Peter-Outers

Drum Report (2004-2006)

It all started with The Drum Report. I launched the first version of Drum Report in 2004 — at the time I was in my 2nd year at Cal Poly. It was a review / article site built on Wordpress (1.0!) written by me and a few of my friends. I was making a little bit of money off adsense, but nothing to speak of. Sometime in early 2005 I implemented a feed-scraper (CSV baby!) of products from Zzounds. At first it wasn’t much, but soon I was bringing in 5-6k visitors a day just from search engines. I quickly launched a cheap imitation featuring only the products portion called Guitar Report to suck a little more traffic in. For a brief moment, I was on track to make a good amount of money (and doing around 20k uniques a day from search engine traffic). Then Google came down with the smackdown and killed off most of my traffic (in an effort to kill the Amazon clone sites).

The Drum Report really taught mes Wordpress in & out. I was doing a lot of crazy stuff at the time (which is dead easy now). It also taught me a lot about PHP and dealing with feeds through my scraper. I also learned a ton about SEO. Before Google laid the smack down, I brought a site from a couple hundred uniques to a few thousand uniques in a matter of months. SEO is much harder now.

• 2005 Revenue: $860 in comission, $104 in adsense
• 2006 Revenue: $102 in comission, $50 in adsense

Good Copywriting

Good Copywriting was a site I kind of wish I didn’t get rid of. I created it in 2006 as a test to see if I could make any money from blogging. I tried, and pretty much failed. A few months after neglecting it, I sold it on Sitepoint for $750. It sold immediately and I clearly should have raised the price much, much higher. The primary source of income was text-link-ads.

• Text-Link-Ads Revenue (1 year): ~$100
• Selling price: $750

The Winners

Hemingway

Hemingway was a theme I created for the original Typo blog theme contest and eventually ported to Wordpress. It’s something I’ve neglected, and I’m sad I have. In any case, it’s also by far my most profitable side-project. I offer discount codes to Dreamhost on the source page, and through those referral codes I ended up making a lot of money. (For the record, Warpspire is still hosted on DreamHost, and I honestly do recommend them if you’re into shared hosting).

• 2006 Revenue: $5,400
• 2007 Revenue: $3,100
• 2008 Revenue: $1,300

Total Spore

Total Spore was a random project i started after seeing the GDC video in ‘05. Over the years it grew slowly, to it’s peak in September when it brought in a quarter million pageviews. It’s still there, and I’ve unfortunately been neglecting it for a while. I need to spend more time on it, I really do. Income is a little fuzzy on this, but for practical purposes, all revenue is in 2008.

Another thing of note is that I was actually offered a great deal of money from a couple of companies who more or less wanted the domain & members and transition it to some horrid “social platform.” I refused because I didn’t really need the money, and it just felt mean to the members.

• Affiliate Earnings: $500
• Adsense Earnings: $700

Lessons Learned

I’ve learned a lot of lessons through my side projects. Much more than I could ever share. I’d say the brute of my web knowledge comes from my side projects: I learned to design, develop, and market through them to varying successes. But I’ve also learned some specific tips:

1. SEO is fleeting and not to be relied upon: Until you are getting a lot of visitors based on a lot of backlinks (coming from quality content), Search Engine traffic is not to be trusted. It maybe 10,000 visitors today, but it can easily become 20 visitors tomorrow with a simple algorithm change.
2. If you are relying on product affiliate earnings (from eCommerce stores), you have to make them a ton of money: I always thought that once I started making other people money I’d make more money myself. I’ve sold hundreds of thousands of dollars in products for other companies over the years and really not made much in return.
3. Mainstream advertising (adsense, banners, etc) really only works on anonymous users: Showing these ads to logged-in users will only drive down your clickthrough rate & earnings. Hide them, not becuase it’s nice — because it’s profitable.
4. I really don’t know how to make money through advertising: I just don’t have the knack for selling ads on sites. I don’t know what it may be, but I am just not engineered for it.
5. It’s really, really cheap to maintain sites: Earnings of a couple thousand dollars may not mean much in the grand sceme of things, but keep up your projects! Every one of my side-projects is hosted between a DreamHost account and one $70/mo Slicehost server (which is about double the horsepower I need).

The Future

I’m actively trying (no, really!) this year to make some of my side projects more profitable than the past. I know a lot of revenue streams, and I have about five new ideas every night. I just need to execute, execute, execute! My goal this year is to get to a monthly revenue of $1500/mo by the end of the year. The plans are:

• Find out how to advertise my sites. I’m happy reinvesting, but I just don’t know how.
• Figure out a way to monetize Poetry With Meaning
• Grow Total Spore, find more revenue streams
• Resurrect Drum Report if possible
• Find a way to sell knowledge through Warpspire (mini-ebooks have been on my mind for a couple years now, but I’ve failed to follow through with those)
• Spend some time with Hemingway again and pump it with life. Consider releasing new themes.

Oh yeah, and maybe work on non-side projects enough so I can pay rent and eat food :)

1. 

   Matt

   January 5^th | #

   Hey Kyle,
   goodcopywriting.com is a great domain name. I can see why someone jumped at paying $750 for it. If it makes you feel any better it doesn’t look like they’ve done anything with it.

   (also your link to totalspore is messed up)

   -Matt

2. 

   Matt

   January 5^th | #

   Surprised that your most profitable side project (Hemingway) isn’t on your “Future” list. Would love to see another Hemingway-quality GPL theme as I think in addition to generating revenue it had a positive effect on the theme community as a whole.

3. 

   weston deboer

   January 5^th | #

   I agree that it is weird that you don’t have plans for hemmingway, But I think that is the best plan. You do the most work before and let it ride while you expand your other options to make some more money. I like it very much. Very informative post indeed!

4. 

   Kyle

   January 5^th | #

   Ah, I guess I just didn’t post it in there — I do have plans to do more with Hemingway and more with WP/other themes in general. That’s what I get for writing posts at 2am :)

5. 

   Paul Stamatiou

   January 7^th | #

   Great post Kyle. The only side project I have to speak of (not including my blog) was flickrslidr.com that was a weekend of coding, 2 months of traffic building and then a $3k sitepoint sale.

6. 

   Ben

   January 7^th | #

   I’ve been thinking along the same lines lately – I really need to put my “downtime” to good use and work on some side projects. First I just need to learn a “real” programming language :)

7. 

   Ryan

   January 8^th | #

   Really interesting run through and analysis of your projects. Very interesting and surprising your Dreamhost referrals went over so well, congrats.

8. 

   Spencer Alexander

   January 10^th | #

   God, I’ve got an ever expanding list of side-project-ideas. Only if people paid money for silly ideas…

   It was really nice to see the scaling income of your side-projects; knowing that a good side-project brings in X dollars, an okay side-project brings in Y dollars, and so forth was really helpful to me. Good luck increasing your income!

9. 

   David

   January 12^th | #

   Hey thanks for sharing about your projects. Most people don’t really explain what they are working on and what is working (or failing) for them. Like you said, “job security” keeps people like us from being able to learn from people like you.

10. 

    Farid Hadi

    January 21^st | #

    Really nice to read an article like this. My only project at the moment is PixyJobs (which I’m advertising on your blog).

11. 

    Eduardo

    February 26^th | #

    Hi,
    One idea for a mini-ebook: write one scrutinizing hemingway. How it’s structured, the reasons for your design choices, how to tweak it, and maybe how to tweak it keeping the good taste (like some typography advice, etc).
    I bet you have in your head. And you have already created the audience: the need is there, all that’s left is market the ebook.
    Good luck!

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