Transparency

Hey all, if we’re asking you to support us on Patreon I thought it might be useful if you knew exactly who and what you’re supporting.

Last updated Mar.1.2019

As of 2018/2019 Pocketables is owned by Paul King. You can call it a sole proprietorship should you want. It was a $1000 paid to Crowdgather, along with roughly $3500 debt owed to Paul wiped off.

Advertising income

We have two advertising sources of income. These are Google Adsense and the Primis video player in the top right. Adsense as of March 2019 is averaging about $2.30 a day. Primis hasn’t leveled out since it went live in December but we’re looking at about $1 I believe (I’ll update this when we finally reach payment threshold).

If I did the math right before it’s about $83 a month average income.

Site expenses (yearly)

We currently are receiving free hosting. I do not expect this to last forever, but for now there’s no outgo.

We pay yearly for the Yoast plugin (so people can find us via Google), Disqus (so we don’t have their horrible advertising in additional to our less horrible advertising,) VaultPress (so we don’t lose more than a day’s anything when we lose our free hosting,) and a couple of plugins or themes we’ve paid for and do not use and can’t get refunded (whatevs,) $20/mo Cloudflare to handle the oddly absurd load – figuring about $775 out a year as of this writing.

Yes, that’s more than the $426 I thought in Feb 2019. I’d forgotten cloudflare and the unused non refundable plugins.

Other expenses

Approx $232 a year for software, activated SIMs, that may or may not be Pocketables exclusive related. Really not sure how to look at this.

Editor / Author income

Editors work for themselves at the moment. They’re free agents. They get and review items and make links that if an item is sold they make a commission off of. I’ve asked all editors to never post something just to get a sale.

Amazon is where most of the editors get referral link income. This can range from 2-10% depending on number of sales made that month, number of sales in department X, etc. We generally anticipate at 8% commission on sales.

There are some Rakuten marketing links, and occasionally a shareasale link. You can imagine anything sold is worth some percentage to us. I do try and make it clear that any Amazon link we have is probably tagged. Should you not want to give us commission just go to Amazon and search whatever we’re talking about.

Paul additionally is paying himself back for the purchase of the site / $5k in diaper money via advertising.

How we get review units, and what’s expected.

It’s not currently profitable for the editors to do a hate piece. This is a problematic situation. People want to know what to not purchase but there’s no incentive to really explore the thousand plus reasons product X sucks.

We’re also getting Product X at the mercy of a PR firm. PR firms have long memories. We do burn some bridges occasionally when something outright lies on specs, but generally a meh unit there’s no good that will come of posting about it.

This unfortunately leads it to read like Pocketables likes everything. No, everything reviewed the reviewers liked, you have no idea the amount of stuff that wasn’t. We unfortunately don’t have the money to straight up purchase these things.

Site/Paul’s income

2018: $615.35 (Amazon)
2018: $975.65 Google Adsense
2018: $117.00 (direct donations)

Sales from used review units

2018: $0 – I do not sell the items I review. Sort of took a position a few years back I’m fine with giving them away, occasionally I’ll get a bucket of tech and let people come and go through it and say if they want to drop some Guinness off that’s cool.

Selling the items feels a little like I’ve been paid to provide a review.

Pay to advertise on Pocketables?

We do not accept pay to advertise with us. We do not accept money to do a review. Well, if it’s a lot, maybe, go ahead and bribe me people someone throw a number… no.

This is something we’ve considered, but at the moment I do not know a good way that’s not annoying and doesn’t look cheap to put sponsored content up.

What about the unrelated things?

Pocketables has from time to time covered medical devices, bulletproof vests, air filters, sleep masks, and a host of things that look like we were paid to promote them.

Nope. Honestly, if Paul (me) covered it, I was offered it for review and thought it seemed like a neat idea. Sometimes I purchased the item and wanted to play with it.

Prime example: Enchroma colorblind glasses – so neat I bought three pair, although that third was because my first two were stolen. SentryShield sent us a bulletproof backpack insert – I really wanted to see how that worked. The air filters involve plants and NASA and as a kid who wanted to be a botanist and an astronaut, there ya go.