Revenue Tally

The community web sites revenue for September was a paltry $682.52. The sites delivered 6852 hits to advertisers. My guess is that they delivered about 80,000 hits to local sites. Once again, the moral of the story is: Building community web sites with no support from the community is a losing venture.

I manage to collect only about 90% of the take. Hosting costs and what not cost around $300 a month. The sites would be delivering a liveable income if I suceeded in getting people to link to it.

I've had great success in getting people to link to the sites in Colorado. In Colorado, Montana and most other states, people really love their community. In Utah, people tend to divide into camps. If I was way counter culture, I might get support or if I was part of the dominant group, I would get links.

I guess the second morale of the story is, if you want to a community web site, do so in a place where people really love their community.

I know, I keep dwelling on the revenue issue. If I had revenue, then I could hire people to help maintain and add content to the sites. Without a provable revenue stream, the sites will just languish in their current pathetic state.

Anyway, after tallying up the monthly stats, I decided to go the extra step to see where the money is coming from. Only a few of my advertisers let me track sales back to the originating web sites. The table below shows YTD income for those merchants.

Town	Hits	Pct Hits	Income	Percent	Cats	Dir Imprs	Pct
Salt Lake City	7528	38.0%	$750.05	27.6%	281	322172	44.3%
Math	1406	7.1%	$340.53	12.5%			0%
Denver	2043	10.3%	$281.43	10.4%	157	56817	7.8%
Missoula	1445	7.3%	$255.54	9.4%	58	42555	5.9%
Provo	1710	8.6%	$223.33	8.2%	108	74295	10.2%
Grand Junction	932	4.7%	$165.99	6.1%	66	45086	6.2%
Heber	311	1.6%	$98.18	3.6%	22	8940	1.2%
Park City	724	3.7%	$94.50	3.5%	58	28689	3.9%
Cheyenne	527	2.7%	$93.74	3.5%	44	16216	2.2%
Ogden	766	3.9%	$89.33	3.3%	48	16709	2.3%
Saint George	504	2.5%	$65.17	2.4%	49	21029	2.9%
Vernal	330	1.7%	$58.26	2.1%	26	15856	2.2%
Bend	208	1%	$49.96	1.8%	28	8001	1.1%
Cedar City	337	1.7%	$46.94	1.7%	35	11783	1.6%
Tooele	194	1%	$27.66	1%	29	9930	1.4%
Springs	301	1.5%	$23.40	0.9%	44	10303	1.4%
Moab	184	0.9%	$19.28	0.7%	40	16223	2.2%
Boulder	243	1.2%	$19.00	0.7%	41	9702	1.3%
Price	84	0.4%	$8.8	0.3%	21	7237	1.0%
Glenwood Springs	33	0.2%	$3.98	0.1%	17	5316	0.7%
	19810	...	$2715.07	...	1172	726859	...

I've thrown the majority of my effort in building Salt Lake Sites. I've done a great deal of begging for inbound links, I have paid for local advertising, etc.. Not surprisingly, slsites.com delivers the most revenue. After Salt Lake, I threw a great deal of effort into Provo and Park City. Here's the odd thing, Denver is a new site and I've done nothing with Missoula for the last year. Both towns out produce Provo and Park City.

When I visit towns like Missoula and Denver, I've noticed that there's people who are just happy about being in the place they live.

I also show the stats from my math web site. My original intent was to put a great deal of effort in the math site. My initial tests showed it would do nothing but hemorrhage cash. Times have changed. The data seems to show that I should stop wasting time on Utah, where there is little potential and work on the math and move back to Colorado.