Quite a good month for me, certainly a large increase since my last reported month (August).

• Adsense: £430.75 (provisional – they often deduct something before payment) – Equiv in USD: $668.67
• Display advertising: $1082.55 (and this is awaiting two days figures on one network so should increase by about $7) – Equiv in GBP: £697.36
• Affiliate: £380.6 (equiv: $590.82)

Overall that’s the equivalent of £1508.71 or $2342.04

Or, compared with August, a 185.6% increase (almost three times the amount).

Will January be as high? The end of the season will bring down advertising rates, but equally I found a new network in mid December that did really well and what it advertises isn’t very related to Christmas, plus my educational sites usually do really well in January as people go back to school as doing quite badly in December when students are largely off school. I’ll be conservative and estimate I’ll make the same.

My calculation for what I’d need next year to survive in London was £1100 after tax and expenses, tax on that amount at the moment would be roughly £120, plus company expenses are roughly £300 a month, so I’ve just about made it to that point.

With August over  I thought I’d do the a post in the time-honoured tradition of web business owner bloggers: an earnings breakdown. I made £528.28 from my sites, plus a bit extra from article writing makes it £781.5. Not exactly enough to live on yet, but August is a traditionally bad month and what I class as my web income isn’t entirely my only source. I’ll set a modest increase of £750 from sites and £1000 overall as my target for September.

Earnings:

• Adsense: £111.77 (equiv in US$180.80) only, still better than July but nothing like February which was over £300 and almost paid for my rent in Oxford (which was £318.75 a month). On the bright side the last two days averaged about £15 each after adding adsense to one of my biggest games sites, and it looks like that is continuing, so that combined with Schools going back for my educational sites should mean that a £450 September is possible. I’ll target that amount as I am planning on putting a lot of work into my biggest history site, American Presidents, this month which should pay off as it makes about two thirds of its revenue from Adsense (I recently moved the site from being static to WordPress to make updating things easier).
• Display networks: $569.10 (equiv £351.74) In addition to the usual networks I was convinced by a persistent emailer to join Intergi which specialise in pre-roll video ads. I added them to my two main games sites late in the month, around the 24th, and they are doing ok – $23.82 (£14.72) but not great compared with other sources. Still it’s a form of advertising that doesn’t interfere with others and as its common practice on these sorts of sites I don’t think users will be too pissed off. From the impression count it seems as though they are only able to show ads to people in the wealth English-language countries (UK, US, etc). ValueClickMedia did $156.56 (£96.76), picking up towards the end of the month, about average since April, but far lower than January/February when it was doing $300 and December when it was doing $500 (although a majority of that was coming from Funny Signs, which I since sold). CasaleMedia also faired badly, with $175.38, it’s lowest month for a long time, but again this reflects August being a traditionally bad month for online games. Tribal Fusion which is only on Craziness.com saw $185.71 (£114.77), slightly lower than normal but August is always a bad month for online games. Burst Media did a pitiful $27.63 (£17.07), compared with May which was over $180, but this is due to the lack of summer traffic on American Presidents, the one site I have in Burst.
• Affiliate Income: £64.77 / $104.79. TradeDoubler had another poor month for me, only £57.35. Put a few more links to amazon books (previously only one President had any) on American Presidents, still need to add links for about 4/5ths of the Presidents, and August is a quiet month, but $12 (£7.42) in commission from 9 items is a promising start.
• Advertising income: None at all, and I had to write off the possibility of $1500 which someone who has paid for advertising before originally agreed to months ago then went AWOL on me. I used to make a lot off a debt help site that hardly got any traffic I sold this year. Perhaps I should make more advertiser friendly sites like that again.
• Article writing: £253.22/$409.70. Not strictly web income, but did this to get a little bit extra in the bank as I’ll need money later this year.