Update on my OTHer site

Anyone catch that title? Ha.

I thought I might give an update on my OTHer site – One Tree Hill Blog. I try not to talk about it too much but really, it takes a good bit of my time so it deserves a little attention on my personal blog.

A few stats for you

1. The site opened on December 10, 2007. That’s somewhere around 7 weeks in. I can’t find a calendar right now…doing the math…that’s 51 days.
2. I post at least once day and probably average 5 a day through the week.
3. In the last two weeks we’ve averaged
   1. 2500 Page Loads
   2. 1000 Unique Visitors
   3. 186 Returning Visitors
4. Our best day is Wednesday, the day after the show. Today we’ll probably hit 6,000 page loads and have over 2,000 unique visitors.

We are involved in the following ad programs:

1. Adsense (get paid when people click on ads)
2. Linkshare (get paid when people buy from iTunes)
3. Kontera (get paid when people click on in-text links)
4. BlogHerAds (get paid per impression – sort of) – we’ve only been with them for 2 weeks

To-date income for each are:

1. Adsense: $55
2. Linkshare: $9.40
3. Kontera: $15
4. BlogHerAds: $87

Here are a few thoughts on that:

1. I’m a little disappointed in Adsense. While my stats have increased, I think they’re still pretty low.
2. Considering we only get 2% of purchases of .99 songs and $1.99 episodes I’m happy with this.
3. Since a lot of our content is video and pictures, it’s hard to get quality links from Kontera, but I’d rather have $15 than not.
4. BlogHerAds and I have a love/hate relationship. While I’m happy that I’m getting recognized for all the page views, somewhere along the way my page views in my statcounter and their page impressions in their reports don’t match up. Not sure why. And while I’m all for helping people out, we get A LOT of their Public Service Announcement ads…sometimes 25% in a day. Just doesn’t seem right. I’ve emailed their folks and they say it’s because of a lull in ads.

So if I had all that up, I’m thinking I’d average about $200/month which is great for a hobby, but as a part-time job, $50/wk is pretty paltry. I’m certainly not in it totally for the money, it does help to have your time rewarded.

So here’s the thing, I love OTH but it takes A LOT of time. I spend hours and hours a week working on it and I have really been thinking of selling it.

Part of me wants to sell. Part of me is scared what will happen to it if I do. Part of me doesn’t care. Part of me doesn’t want the rejection if it never sells. Part of me doesn’t want to sell something I built from the ground up. Part of me wants released from the pressure of keeping it updated. Part of me likes being in the loop.

So you see, I’m quite torn about it. For now I think I’m hanging in there but that could change in oh about a minute.

If you’ve read this far, congratulations, I’m not sure I would have done the same. If you want to chat about web site stuff or have any suggestions for me, leave a comment or send me an email. As you can see, I could go on forever about it.