March Stats

There are a lot of bored people stuck at home right now, which is good for me from a purely business point of view. Traffic yesterday (3/31) was my 2nd highest all time and preview creation volume was my highest all time. My traffic is currently about 2x what it was doing at the beginning of the month.

Gross profit was ~$2960. SDE was pretty much flat at around $1900, but that tends to lag about a month behind on big traffic changes.

I tried a few new ads in March -- Carbon and a hand-placed sponsorship. Carbon didn't perform well (too much international traffic), but I find them very appealing from a usability point of view. If I can grow sales/traffic to the point where the ad revenue is not as meaningful I could see going back to those instead of dropping ads entirely.

The sponsorship performed well, but had some knock-on effects (pageviews and intros created were down ~15-20%). Overall revenue was up, but shifted the mix of revenue to be more like 60/40 sales/ads instead of the usual 80/20. I'm glad I took the time to set up an A/B test (25% of my traffic stayed on a control) to analyze this.

I'm mostly running the site in maintenance-mode during the pandemic. All of my "tinker time" is going towards building some completely unrelated stuff that my kids can use until school starts back up.