January 2011 content site earnings

January was a not a good month for me for content-site earnings -- it was the worst month, in fact, since I started this blog in July, 2010.  I was burnt out on writing and didn't do very much.  I got a second wind at the end of the month, though, so (knock on wood) the numbers in next month's earnings post may be better.

January earnings

Change from previous month

Lots of red here. December's Helium earnings were actually for two months (due to a change in the payment schedule), so the difference may not be quite as bad as it looks:

Change from the average (since I started this blog):

More red, alas.

Notes:

Associated Content:  Received $13.25 in upfronts (down from $30.00 last month) and $9.49 (down from $25.88) in performance payments.

Constant Content:  No income from Constant Content this month.

Demand Media Studios:  Received $45.00 in fixed-fee upfronts (down from $60.00).  In the one bright spot in this month's earnings stats, my revenue share was $19.29 (for only 4 articles!),  the highest it has ever been since I started at DS.   (It went up from $14.10 last month, with an average per article per month of $4.82, up from $3.52).

The DS revenue share has gone way up this past year.  A year ago, the monthly revenue share was only $3.10 (for 3 articles), and then it dipped even lower before starting to soar.  If you've been following this blog, you know I've usually skeptical of content-site claims, but the DS revenue share has exceeded my expectations -- and it has far surpassed what I would have received had I sold the articles at the fixed-fee rate.

Helium:  Compiling the numbers for Helium has become very simple this month, because 100% of the $35.40 I received was for revenue share (for 262 articles).  No upfronts, no bonuses, no new or old Marketplace sales, no stock content.  Just pure passive income.  The revenue share per article per month comes out to 14 cents (down from 16 cents last month). Fourteen cents a month is not very good.  The Demand Studios average per-article revenue share this month was a rather astonishing 34 times higher than Helium's. (Edited 2/15/11 after correcting calculation for previous month's rev share.)