Transparency (Feb 2019)
Hey all, this coming up on being the first year I’ve owned Pocketables this is the first year I’ve had access to Adsense, revenues, traffic, and am under no obligation to keep things secret.
Thought I’d reveal a little bit about Pocketables and who it is and what it does right now.
When I started writing for GoodAndEVO we were looking at 8 million+ readers a month. Due to everything that happened with CG, G&E’s domain being sold to Mitsubishi by people who didn’t understand that was the main entryway to the content, massive downtimes, and other mind boggling stuff that went on three years, Pocketables and G&E snatched complete defeat from the jaws of victory.
Owner (2018/2019)
So, Pocketables is currently owned by Paul King, some rando who lives in Nashville.
Site financials
Purchase price March 2018: effectively $5K-8K (we traded out what I was owed,) out of pocket $1000. I think I’d figured $5,326 was what I could claim via invoices but there was a year more where I was working for free.
Site income: Google Adsense and the little Primis video. I don’t have exact numbers but it breaks down to about $83 in advertising income a month, which is not particularly good, but oh well. Choice is either ads everywhere for double/triple the money and everyone runs away, or a few.
Site donations: $117 (2018) – I think.
Site outgo: hosting, plugins (Yoast, Disqus, Vaultpress, couple plugins we bought and will not use any more, there will be some for the theme shortly) – $317.10-$426.10 yearly outgo.
So site financials year 1: +$686.90
Year 1 site balance: -$313.10 / -$4,639.10
The site will pay for itself sometime in 2025 hopefully.
Author income
Author income is only through monetization of items they review and donations they receive (seriously, tip our Tasker guy.) We’ve got a policy of don’t lie to sell it, it’s not worth losing a reader who gets a crap product. Not worth being untrusted for a couple of bucks commission.
However due to the nature of effort it’s difficult to enthuse an editor to review a product that’s absolute rubbish, so we’re trying to figure out how to do that.
Paul does not sell review items given to him, although they have been traded for beer in the past. Most are given away. I’ve got a bucket of tech stuff that needs to go.
Paul made approximately $600 on Amazon referrals or $50 a month. That said, products were split between theITbaby (which sells a lot of diapers,) and Pocketables.
Other authors made what they made.
You might have noticed Paul did some shareasale and Rakuten marketing links. The commission between these was less than $50 last year unless I’m missing something. Not sure I’ll meet the minimum ever.
How we get all these wonderful toys
Paul’s been to CES many many a year. He’s on PR lists, companies oddly love his reviews, and usually like the detail things get. Beats me why, we’re linked by several large companies, I have contacts. The editors/authors have contacts. Most of our editors post pretty awesome reviews as well.
A $300 product probably costs a company $30-50 to make and $10 to ship from a PR firm. This means a couple of sales from any website is probably enough to justify sending to small potatoes, which we currently are.
How we get all these wonderful authors
I asked a while back if anyone wanted to help the site. Several stepped up. Many stepped back eventually. It was worth it for some, still is for others, who knows. Everyone gets to do their own thing basically, they get some of the contacts and products people ask us to review, they get a platform to put their content in front of a few hundred thousand people, etc.
We could use a news blogger if anyone’s interested. Would save me some time and let me do some projects. Unfortunately there’s next to no way to get income on that and I keep bugging John Freml to come back and work for nothing, but for a different person. Evidently that’s not all that appealing.
Site biases
PC / Mostly Android / if it can be done inexpensively take the time to learn how and don’t pay for something.
Do we hate Mac/Apple? No. Do we cover them? Barely. Plenty of websites to cover them and I don’t think anyone here is in that sphere (feel free to contact me if you’re wanting to write about iStuff for Pocketables).
A slight majority of writers are US based.
We try to not sensationalize not news.
Where can I get a T-Shirt?
Target. Seriously, they’ve got the softest ones there although you need to make sure to tumble dry low or just hang them. No, we don’t have shirts.
Well that’s all very disappointing
Not really, the last 4 years was disappointing. Watching a company lose Pocketables authors left and right was disappointing. Being down for literally a month over two and a half years was disappointing. This is just an attempt to restart, fix, stabilize, and move forward.
We’ve been down 25 minutes this year with my hosting if I remember correctly.
Plus I’m an egotists, this is my stage, and I like playing with tech toys.
