October 2024 Website Portfolio Income Report

Let’s check out the income report for my website portfolio for October 2024. Spoiler alert: things are not getting better and I am starting to lose the final traces of optimism I still had left in regards to publishing blogs/websites as an independent creator.

I will go a bit more in-depth below, but first, if you’re only interested in the money – here are the numbers for the top five websites in my portfolio.

October 2024 Website Income Report Overview

Note: I am only sharing my top 5 websites, although I have more. However, all websites outside of my top 5 barely make a profit monthly, so are negligible (and I no longer work on them). Here’s the breakdown of my income:

Mediavine Income: $1,233.23
SheMedia Income: $220.50
Affiliate Revenue: $217.75
Journey by Mediavine: $58.48
Other Income: $214.13 (Patreon + eBook sales)

This October, my websites generated $1,944.09. That’s $285.71 BETTER than last month! But despite the apparent improvement, you will see that things are not that good overall!

I also have monthly expenses eating up the profits. Here is what I spent in October:

Great hosting (BigScoots & WPX): $134.59
GeneratePress Premium: $2.29 (read my GeneratePress theme review here)
WP Rocket Plugin: $19.76
Domain-related expenses: $0
Accountant: $182
Other expenses: $0
TOTAL: $338.64

Also, I pay social security and health insurance (around $286 per month), plus tax on profits (10%).

This means that my net earnings from my websites in October 2024 here:

$1,187.50

This is a nice improvement over September with +$256.76 more entering my pockets.

However, as I said, this isn’t entirely extremely good news. October is, by tradition, my BEST month of the year. This year, it’s just my 3rd best month with no real growth anticipated unless Google manages to fix their algos. Which I doubt will ever happen.

I usually make in January (and up to March) around half of what I’m making in October. So… the future gives me some solid bits of anxiety.

But I have already started to pivot, seeing some encouraging results. I think that in 2025 I will move more and more away from what I love doing – which is writing on my websites – and turn to things that make money. I have to eat and pay bills, after all…

As you will see in the detailed reports, a big chunk of the extra money reported this month comes from me publishing my first eBook – relatively successfully. More on that below, though (at Website #3 report).

Let’s quickly go through each of my websites now, to see where they were in this past month and why things aren’t as encouraging as they might appear above.

Website 1 (entertainment niche)

Traffic: 18,817 sessions (-1,998 vs last month)
Gross income: $434.15 (+$12.37)
Articles: 5 new, 6 edited

Traffic keeps dropping. This website is shadowbanned by Google (or whatever you want to call it) – meaning that although Search Console shows it as indexed and there are still some pages still ranking (some even in the top 10), for the most part, you can’t find it on Google Search.

And the pages that are still there are losing traffic because content in this niche dies after a few months usually, and new content is required. But since I had very poor results with adding new content… I don’t think it’s even worth trying too much.

So, compared to last month, traffic is still dwindling down (10% more compared to last week and over 95% down compared to August 2023). And that engagement time is atrocious, definitely not sending any good vibes Google’s way…

A couple of months I did some spring cleaning here, trashing a few hundred articles, but nothing changed yet.

I did publish a few new articles, out of which one did well… but on Bing (getting some 530 views in 2 weeks). From Google – zero traffic. But at this point, I am happy with any type of success, so I have to figure out a way to ride the Bing wave as much as possible.

Website 2 (local travel niche)

Traffic: 9,241 sessions (1,227)
Gross income: $176.24 (+$2.72)
Articles: 1 new, 11 edits

Surprisingly, I found out that this website is also shadowbanned by Google. I found this shocking because it is a passion project of mine – basically a local travel website about the location I live in. My content is not just more accurate than almost everything online (because of the direct experience), but I also have plenty of original photos and experience… nothing seems to matter.

The interesting thing I found is that if I search for various keywords with ChatGPT’s new online feature activated, my website is usually the #1 source for the answers – as it should. This makes me happy, although I doubt I will get many organic clicks from this. But at least, as opposed to Google’s view, ChatGPT’s search engine gives me at least some credit.

Note: You can read my impressions and findings in my article pitting ChatGPT’s Search vs Google Search.

I still plan to work on this website, especially since it’s making a solid chunk of monthly money from Patreon anyway. It’s also, as I said, a passion project and since I like writing on this topic, I will keep it alive for as long as possible.

Website 3 (health niche)

Traffic: 10,898 sessions (-167)
Gross income: $543.45 (+$139.91)
Articles: 1 new, 4 edits

My health website, which should also not be penalized by the HCU due to my expertise and experience on the subject matter, is also dead on Google (shadowbanned or whatever you want to call it).

The main traffic sources are Pinterest, other social media, and Bing. It is probably the only website still online on this particular health topic that is actually written by somebody who also has this problem. It’s sad to see how Google absolutely doesn’t care.

This month, I also launched an eBook on the website’s topic and it was a relative success, generating around 25 sales and estimated royalties of around $148. This is a win in my books, even though I was expecting (or, better said, hoping for) more.

I will write more in-depth about the book launch, but until then, here are the fails and wins:

Facebook was the biggest fail. I have a Facebook group with over 40,000 people who have this particular health issue, so they would’ve been great potential customers. However, the reach of my posts was of up to 200… even when using tags like @everyone and such. Very bad.
My email list did well… I have around 1,000 subscribers and several have purchased the book from my emails.
Finally, I published the news about my book on a few places on Reddit and I think that I generated some sales from there also. Overall, I think that Reddit is the best for generating sales at the moment, since the work involved is close to zero (just post a short post on various subreddits).

Also, the end of the year is not a good time for this particular health niche – January and February are great for everything health-related, and I am planning to push hard then. We’ll see how things go, but overall I was satisfied with the results from the sales and I welcome this little diversity in terms of income.

Website 4 (entertainment niche)

Traffic: 42,159 sessions (-626)
Gross income: $581.91 (+$99.24)
Articles: 6 new, 2 edited

This is the only website that still gets love from Google (and surprisingly, almost no love from Bing). Either way, it keeps growing on Google, and I love to see that. I even received a congratulatory message from Big G at the end of the month:

The thing is that I don’t do anything special or different here. I strive to keep the content fresh, updated, engaging, and useful – but I do the same with all my other websites. At least this one works, although it’s in a niche that I am not as invested in as I used to be…

But, at this point, I will take any win.

Website 5 (travel niche)

Traffic: 5,645 sessions (-81)
Gross income: $109.10 (+$31.47)
Articles: 0 new, 10 edits

Traffic seems to be somewhat stable here. Add to that an increase in earnings caused by it being accepted by Journey by Mediavine, and I have enough reasons to try and invest some of my time in it, hoping that it will get betterin.

It’s also getting little love from Google – it seems to have gotten a site-wide penalty of sorts (although no manual action). Also, being in a general travel niche, it’s not the best time of the year in terms of traffic.

However, I did invest a lot of time working on the site this past month. I changed its theme from my favorite – GeneratePress (read why I like it so much here), just to try something else, more flashy, with more features and options and especially with an autoload option and a “click to expand” feature on articles.

This increases engagement rates and page views, but so far I haven’t noticed any improvements on Google. But it’s still soon, so I’ll give it more time.

Check my previous earning reports:

If you want to get more in-depth with how things were in the past months, click the links below:

Final thoughts & plans

In October, I was busy working on my websites, and mostly on the release of my ebook. It was the first time I launched an eBook and it was an interesting experience. I will have an article about it soon.

I am considering testing the waters of YouTube with the same health niche website – basically turn my articles into YouTube scrips and do talking head videos for each. I hope that this won’t only give me more exposure and potentially more opportunities for ranking, but also send more signals to Google that this is a legit website, so it can once again send more traffic this way.

With ad RPMs varying from $20 (bad months) to $50 (good months), I would love to get as much traffic as possible and build myself further as an authority.

Overall, I don’t think that blogging remains viable for small publishers like myself. Blogging is not dead, but it’s very difficult right now. One thing is also clear, in my opinion: Gone are the days when you could build 100s of niche websites and reap the profits. Now, it’s better to focus on one or two great products (or even a few more if you have solid teams in place).

Over to you know – how was October 2024 for your online empire? Anything in particular that seems to work right now? Let me know by sharing your thoughts down below in the comments section!