In July, Experiglot’s NPV grew to $89.93. Traffic has continued to grow, albeit a bit slower, in large part due to my guest writing stint over at All Things Financial and having my post on ETFs picked up by TheStreet.com.

Revenue sources have finally diversified a bit: I got my first ad request from Linkworth (see left sidebar) and decided to sign up for Emigrant Direct’s affiliate program. We’ll see if it’s worth keeping or not.

You might have noticed that the graph on the upper left sidebar is now based on quarters rather than months. It just got too hard to read, so I decided to simplify it a bit now that I’m into my 3rd quarter of this experiment and aggregate data can actually be used.

It’s the end of the month and quarter, so time again for the close of books. Experiments in Finance’s NPV finally turned positive this month to $19.95. But as usual, the calculations ignore labor costs, so maybe it doesn’t have much meaning. Still, I’ll take small victories. My Alexa ranking also increased an order of magnitude to six-digits from seven. Happily, traffic continues to build, but I can’t expect to see these growth rates for much longer, methinks.

Revenue this month included a one-off $5 Mturk hit for placing a link to a site called Web1Marketing for one week. I’m also starting to see some earnings from Amazon, but they’re so paltry that I’ve decided to be conservative and only recognize revenue when there’s a good chance of realizing payment. (Amazon has a $10 minimum payment threshold.)

Otherwise, I’d have to create a reserve account, which would complicate matters since this project is being run on a cash rather than accrual basis. I’m still hoping to diversify income among advertisers once I have enough popularity and traffic to be attractive to them.

So, I’m off to build more content (well, after the Brazil-France game). The last couple of weeks have been busy, but more how-to-calculate-type finance posts coming now that I have a little more time to spend writing them.

Experiglot’s NPV edged up a bit to -$20.96 thanks to finally netting positive from Adsense for the first time (and, ignoring labor costs as usual; including labor, NPV is almost -$4000).

I’ve started incorporating other sources of revenue in the form of Shareasale, Linkworth, and Text Link Ads (all affiliated links). But until I build up enough traffic to be attractive to advertisers, which probably won’t be for a couple of months at the very least, I don’t expect to see anything coming in from those.

At least I now have a rating on Alexa, albeit a 7-digit one. Traffic jumped this month due to a combination of being included in a Problogger group writing project and growing traffic from PFBlogs, and there was definitely some noticeable difference from contributing to blog carnivals.

That’s it for now!

Alright, I’m being a bit tongue-in-cheek and not really destroying value (yet), but the value of this site did decline in the last two weeks. Despite an increase in revenue, NPV declined by the amount I contributed to pfblogs.org‘s worthy annual drive (which, GAAP be damned, ought to be a capitalized instead of expensed since building the brand equity and advertising of this site should result in positive future economic benefits, right?). How’s that for MBA doublespeak? Happy Monday everyone!

I wrote when I started this site that it was going to be an experiment in many ways, and part of that was to see if it could become self-sustaining or better, even though I never held any high expectations. Well, you know how people are always asking about whether they can make money off of blogs. So, in true finance geek fashion, and to go along with the theme of this site, I decided to calculate what the NPV of this blog would be as if it were a potential project under consideration for investment*.

I’ve added a little graphic to the left sidebar for fun. Now, don’t get excited — it doesn’t update in real time with your clicks and visits or anything, but it’s something I’ll update each month to show how things are going. Right now it just plots the money I get (all from Adsense so far) less the amounts I paid for registering the domain and for hosting service each month at Hostgator. In other words, I don’t include labor costs. (I also plotted traffic visits for fun.) So after four months, the NPV comes to -$28.34. On the other hand, at least my cash flows are less negative each month.

Now, if you’re wondering whether a blog is worth pursuing if you take your time and energy into consideration, I’m afraid the answer is pretty clear in most cases: assuming $10 an hour for 4 hours a day and 20 days a month, the NPV of this blog changes to -$3,196.02!

Compelling evidence to argue that your blog is just your hobby, right?

Read the rest of this entry »