2020 Traffic and Revenue Report

It’s finally 2021 and a good time to look back at 2020 and what it’s been like for our business. If you’ve been following my blog, you probably already know what our reports used to looked like throughout the year. I’ve been publishing detailed reports until September, and they are still available here.

I stopped publishing detailed reports in Q3 due to lack of time. We’ve increased our production rate around that time and ever since then, I’ve been super busy. Coming up with 400-500 new topics each month is quite challenging, as you might expect.

Today, I want to catch you up on what’s happened during Q4, and specifically December. I’ve mentioned October and November in previous posts, but it felt like December deserves it’s own post, along with an overview of 2020 and a lookout for 2021.

Overall, December was pretty awesome for our business here. We reached an all-time traffic high of 879,260 pageviews across the sites that I’ve been covering here in Yeys. Not only that, but we’ve had more $36,066 in revenue from those sites! That was almost $4,000 more than what we made in November, which was a record month for us too.

Mind you, we’re not expecting the same kind of revenue in January. Looking at the first week data, traffic is trending up but not nearly enough to offset the drop in RPM rates (typical of Q1). Let’s take a look at 2020 as a whole.

2020 Overview

2020 was certainly one for the books. When most people say that, they mean to say it was a dreadful year. After all, it’s not every year that we have a global pandemic. Beyond infection rates and the death toll, the economic impact was massive.

Fortunately for us, our own little industry – publishing content and monetizing on the traffic – did quite well. After the initial shock-and-awe phase, traffic boomed and ad rates followed. At least in most niches.

We’ve seen this with our own sites. While our travel site pretty much crashed, our other sites did quite well, benefiting from higher-than-average RPM’s.

Those high RPM’s weren’t unique to our sites. In fact, you can easily see the COVID effect in Ezoic’s Ad Revenue Index. RPM’s went down when COVID19 hit the US, and then bounced back and were generally higher than in 2019.

Ezoic ad index

Part of the increase in Q3 could be attributed to the evening out of annual advertising budgets. Companies that stopped campaigns during March, April and May, put that money into Q3 and Q4 instead. But it’s also entirely possible that we’re seeing a real increase in online advertising budgets, reflecting the fact that people order online more now.

While RPM rates dipped during the second quarter of 2020, traffic boomed in some niches. I blogged about that here, with examples from Google Trends.

How our business did in 2020

When 2020 started, I had this crazy fantasy that we could make it to $20,000 a month in revenue. My husband thought I was being unrealistic. I proved him wrong by June. By October, he left his day job and joined me in managing the business.

This is what our revenue growth looked like in 2020. I still can’t believe this gorgeous chart.

Revenue in 2020

Mind you, the above chart reflects our total revenue, including our flagship site (the one I haven’t covered in Yeys reports so far). Which is no longer our flagship site, as it happens. At least two other sites earn more per month.

So yeah, we’ve actually made over $47,000 in December. I’m still having a hard time wrapping my mind around that figure.

Expanding Our Business

We’ve been growing the business over the year. Back in January we had four VA’s, two part-time editors and around 20 freelance writers. We were publishing around 150 posts per month.

In December, we had six VA’s,  three part-time editors and more than 60 freelance writers. We produced a total of 451 new posts. We also have two people – my husband and I – managing the entire operation. As it turned out, we work very well together, complementing each other’s skill sets and overall the synergy is good.

Plans for 2021

We want to keep blog posts at the 400-500 posts per month level. We have four new websites that we launched in Q4 and hopefully they’ll be coming out of the sandbox later this year.

You’d think that simply managing the business would keep us busy. But just to make sure things don’t get too boring, we plan on moving to the US in the summer. We want to expand our operation while having “boots on the ground”, so to speak.

Of course, we need the American embassy in Israel to open first. So, COVID plays a role. Fortunately, Israel is moving fast with vaccinations, and I’m happy to say all four of us here (husband, myself and both our teenagers) already had our first dose of the Pfizer vaccine. Bar any nasty mutations, I’m hopeful that infection rates will go down by March, and we can move ahead with our plans.

Let me tell you, moving a business to another country is anything but simple. While we’re just a tiny business, there are still tax implications galore. We’re sorting everything out using a team of CPA’s and lawyers and there’s a lot of paperwork to go through.

You could say we’re fairly busy these days! And that’s also why I am keeping this post short.

Thank you for reading so far, and for being a part of our journey during 2020! Hopefully, there will be more interesting things to share in 2021 as well. I’m going to make an effort to post here regularly. I actually appreciate the opportunity to be able to take a break from my other tasks and write, once in a while.

15 Comments

  1. Thanks, Anne – Appreciate your reports – God Bless Greg

    Working on my last site i started – 5 in 2020 – just one starting to move out of sandbox – 12,000 weeeohhh

  2. 47’000$, wow, that’s really amazing! And you two published in December almost as many articles as I did in the whole year =) Hope you will keep us updated!
    Hope you will still show up in the fatstackcommunity from time to time!

    • Thank you, Simonius! Yes, I visit the Fat Stacks community regularly. Several times a week. It’s a great way to stay up to date with what’s going on in the industry. See you there!

  3. Congrats Anne on your great progress in 2020 🙂 With travel being about 1/3 of my business and travel bloggers being 1/3 of another part, I can’t say my progress was as good but I still managed to meet most my goals which seems like a win in 2020 😀 Sounds like an exciting 2021 is in store for you!

    • Thank you, Sharon! I think meeting any goals in 2020 was a win! I really hope 2021 will be better for the travel industry. Hopefully, as the world gets vaccinated, people will gradually go back to sightseeing with a zeal.

  4. Massive congratulations Anne I just loved reading this post. It’s been inspiring reading your posts since last year when I came across your website. Hopefully your business will keep going in the same direction in 2021

  5. Wow. Just wow. I’m so impressed by what you and your husband have achieved this year!
    Unfortunately for me, December was a huge slump. The Google Core Update hit me and I lost 80-90% of my traffic overnight. But that won’t keep me from my original plans. It will just delay them a bit.
    Seeing a post like this just gets me all hyped up again. I just know your business will hit the 6 figure a month mark this year and you definitely deserve it!

  6. Excellent motivating post I’m really happy to see that you were killing it on 2020 you are an inspiration.

    I’m doing more than what you do but it’s indifferent business but I’m shifting my future investments into content websites as well.

    I suggest that this point maybe hire a manager that will manage this tasks instead of you and your husband or at least help you with managing the operation so you can have more free time to spend on some other things.

  7. Hello Anne, I was curious if you use any page speed plugins like wprocket or nitropack? I am running mediavine ads and always thought they caused my speed issues but it seems some sites also with mediavine are still able to pull off sub 1 second loads times. Any suggestions?

    • Hi David,
      We use Litespeed cache on our sites. The plugin choice was made by my developer at the time, so I can’t say I’ve researched this in depth but I think the sites load well. Either way, in my experience, ads always slow down the final loading time, but as long as the content loads up fast and the ads come later, it shouldn’t matter, IMHO.

  8. How do you go about updating the content that you have already written? Since that is an important part of maintaining your rankings, do you have a process or workflow for doing the same?

    You are an inspiration.

    • Hi Matt,
      Nope, no process in place for that. We’ve played around with upgrading content, following various recipes by other bloggers. The additional traffic didn’t justify the effort, at least not in our experience. Investing that effort into creating new content brings in more traffic. Our rankings do well without updating content, or at least as well as they do with content updating. We may still crack the code in the future and find a way to update content that works for us, possibly focusing on specific niches, types of content etc, but for now, we just crank out more new content instead.

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