The last month has been crazy. Running a Kickstarter is far more exhausting than anticipated. But let’s look at last month’s numbers!
The Money Aspect
Amounts in parentheses are losses/expenses.
Hosting: ($17.06)
Stories: ($40.00)
Art: ($200.00)
Advertising: ($104.97)
Paypal Fees: ($2.36)
Donations: $20.00
Ad Revenue: $1.14
Book Sales: $$3.26
Total: ($359.99)
QTD: ($840.49)
YTD: ($840.49)
All Time: ($8,353.06)
As per usual, I try to list costs for art and stories under the month that the stories run on the site rather than when I pay them. I also cover Paypal expenses when paying authors and artists.
Last month I went a little heavy with the advertising. I had a budget for the life of the Kickstarter, and then I overshot it. It’s really hard to get word out about a Kickstarter. I may write an after-action report about it. But long story short: I paid a lot for advertising.
I also added a banner ad to the bottom of the site, which greatly increased revenue. The average bid for that space is higher than the sidebar ones. An important lesson I guess.
Submissions
In February we received an insane 48 submissions. This is a record high for us, almost doubling our previous high. The Kickstarter really brought a lot of attention to us, and that meant we had a large pool of possibilities. 25 of these were exclusives for the quarterlies and 6 were classified ads. Of the 48 submissions, we accepted 27. This included 10 exclusives and all 6 classifieds. We also accepted a couple of stories that were submitted as exclusives for our regular publication instead of exclusives. There were just so many that we shifted some to the regular publication just so we could accept more. That’s 56.25% for the month. Our all-time acceptance rate is 55.2%.
This gives us enough content for the site through mid-August, and we have also filled our exclusives for the rest of the year.
Traffic
Traffic increased significantly in February. We had a total of 1,563 visits. Our traffic consisted of 1,000 unique visitors and 3,079 page views. Our highest daily traffic was 107. It was our second highest month ever in terms of page views, and the best month we’ve had in several months.
February’s search engine term of the month is “self mummification hands behind back.” The mind boggles.
That’s all for this month.
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