[theforum] Financial Report
David Kaufman
david at gigawatt.com
Sun Nov 23 00:52:40 CST 2008
Hi Erika,
Erika <ekm at seastorm.com> wrote:
> We had an important funding discussion going on that seems to have been
> cut short, now. I know what *I* took from it, though we never really
> came
> up with any concrete strategy, or no one stood forward and said "I would
> like to do this" such that we have anything to look forward to in terms
> of
> action. Does someone want to act on this issue? If so, how?
>
> Maybe we could get an update from David: regarding remaining funds? so
> we
> know how much time we have to come up with, and implement, an appropriate
> strategy.
Here is "the skinny" on evolt's current financial picture:
Current Assets
PayPal account 1,724.74
Checking account 230.30
===========================
Total 1,955.04
Expenses (last 12 months)
Hosting 993.74
Domains Godaddy (3) 28.63
===========================
Total 1,022.37
Revenue (last 12 months)
Google Ads 499.49
Donations 85.13
Amazon Referrals 4.45
===========================
Total 589.07
All donations go to (and stay in) PayPal. I still have never transferred
money from PayPal in my 5 years as treasurer except once, about $300 to
cover our initial hosting setup fees at the Planet. All the reserves now
in the PayPal account are from donations (the bulk of it from the 2003
donation drive, although there have been numerous small and regular
donations since, including a few generous "subscriber" donors, who
auto-transfer something each month. They are evolt heroes!
Google, Amazon and (the apparently broken) Cafepress revenue goes into the
checking account, and hosting and domain fees are paid by debit card from
the checking account.
The keen analyst's eye will note that, as previously reported, Google ad
revenue has settled to a level about 60% of its former glory. It used to
track our hosting expenses month for month, sometimes a little more,
sometimes a little less, which was nice. But in the last 18 months as it
has declined, we've consumed about half of the approximately $500 reserve
we'd had in the checking account for about 3 years prior.
So we're now running a $36.11 per month deficit which, if things remain the
same, will not dry up our current assets for 4 and a half years.
So evolt is in no immediate danger that four more kindly-souled $10/month
subscriber-donors couldn't stave off indefinitely :-)
As an interesting aside, an ad sales representative from Google called me
last year to offer to help evolt increase its revenue to $4000 per month by
adding big flashy ads to LEO and WEO. Funny that Google knew exactly how
much traffic we had on those hosts, even though we currently only run their
AdSense tracking codes on BEO... but then I realized, they know how much
traffic we get because they send us most of it, from Google search
click-throughs, which they do track of course. And they know exactly how
much advertisers are willing to pay per thousand impressions on evolt,
because on Google AdWords, advertisers bid on keywords, the keywords Google
generates when it spiders our site.
I patiently explained to him that we weren't capitalists, but he just
didn't get it. Maybe we *should* plaster video ads all over the site, but
I didn't want to be the one crucified here for suggesting it :-)
-dave
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