I'm building a tool site (month 12)

Another month, another update for my tool site terrific.tools.

I've now worked on this project for 12 months. And a wild 12 months it has been.

My initial insight when starting the tool site was two-fold:

I found many tool sites, like Omni Calculator, getting millions of views every month. While many of them benefit from years of acquiring backlinks for free due to ranking highly, I figured that over time there'd be enough opportunities to catch up.

I knew from my old blogging days that making money via display ads could be very lucrative, even though tool sites normally get lower RPMs (cause people don't scroll as much and just use the tool).

When I first started terrific tools, the goal was to monetize it via a file converter app as well as those above-mentioned display ads.

And November 2025 was the first full month where I just did that.

So how did the site do?

It made $174.41 from Mediavine/PubNation display ads and $125 from the sale of the desktop app, so close to $300. Not too shabby!

Ads started out a little disappointing as I was just onboarded to Mediavine. However, in the last week or so, I've gotten closer to my target session RPM of $10 (December's session RPM so far is $6.89).

Still some way to go but at least, assuming traffic demographics remain consistent, there's a pathway to $10 RPM.

Traffic-wise, not much has changed unfortunately. Last 30d traffic is at 26k users, 34k sessions, and 41k page views.

Seems as if right now I am being targeted by some bot traffic because China and Singapore entered my top 5 highest traffic countries.

All of that said, I haven't released any new tools for the main site in a while since our startup (https://genviral.io/, feel free to check) is currently taking up 99% of my time. Made a few improvements to the desktop app, mainly for myself, as I needed those conversions.

For now, I'll probably just use the profits from terrific tools and invest it into backlinks and YouTube sponsorships (once the desktop app is a bit more mature).

I always maintained that this could be a $10k/m project down the line. However, for that to be a reality, I need to significantly increase current traffic, probably by 20x-30x.

And since this was always a long-term (> 5 years) play, I'm prepared to be patient.. :)