PaddlingLight Mid-Year Update

At the beginning of this year, I decided to watch PaddlingLight more closely to see how it was doing in comparison with the time that I’m putting into it. Over the last couple of years, I’ve watched PaddlingLight’s income decrease. I wanted to track if increasing the time spent on the website and doing some design changes would increase revenue.

Unfortunately, it hasn’t.

Here’s PaddlingLight’s YTD gross revenue:

Gross	Type of income
$1790	Affiliate links and ads (Google Adsense, various stores, Advertising Sponsors and Amazon Links)
$719.12	Canoe and Kayak Drawing Sales ($4.12 of taxes collected)
$2,509.12	Total

There’s still about $150 worth of affiliate income out there that hasn’t been paid. This is due to production issues. They don’t pay until the product ships, and they are pretty far behind.

Most of PaddlingLight’s income comes during the summer months, so this is pretty low. During the best years, it was over $10k with a grow path to reach $30k (then Minnesota changed its laws and destroyed the affiliate marketing business in Minnesota. The SCOTUS fixed that, but it stopped the growth instantly). That’s small potatoes compared to some larger or more targeted websites. One of the issues for this year has been I lost a company that was a large part of the income. They stopped doing affiliate links. I haven’t been able to replace all those links, yet, because it’s just me doing the work. They stopped at the beginning of June. Like other companies, the pandemic has caused their supply lines to dry up and they are backordered on many products and sales are up like crazy.

I’ve resisted all the pitches that I’ve received for paid articles with backlinks to some company. I get those types of emails often. I estimate that if I allowed all the companies that email to write articles for this website and pay me for posting them that I’d gain another $500 per month in income from this website. I don’t want to water down the quality of the content though. So, I reject them all.

Also, my email subscription service is going away and not many have switched to the new one, so that’s going to hurt PaddlingLight in the future.

I know a bunch of creators have switched over to a Patreon-style subscription service. I’m not sure that that is in my future for this website, but I’m trying it with my photography page on Facebook. If you want to become a monthly supporter of what I do, you can do it on my Fan Support page on Facebook. It’s $5 a month. If you are doing so because of this website, please, let me know.

Anyway, that’s the mid-year scoop in case you were wondering how I’ve kept this website running for the last 15 or 16 years. I remember the early days of hand coding everything when it was called Nessmuking. I’m really surprised that I’ve kept it running this long.