Ted's Blog

I'm still getting a bunch of traffic from Make, with 900 hits today, a new record. Some of the hits are coming from sites that monitor blogs, like netvibe. But most everyone just visits that page and leaves, so I know they're not that interested other than seeing how many iPod batteries there really are. And it doesn't appear to have resulted in above average ad clicks or Amazon orders.

How exciting!

I continued to get a lot of hits today as people went back to work and their computers. The traffic started dying off this afternoon and then someone who saw it posted almost exactly the same thing (same title even) to digg. Last time I only got 12 diggs, but this time I'm up to 177 already. Posted at 7:00, I was up to 1400 visits in an hour at about 8:00 and a total of 2,610 hits today. This is getting out of hand.

At 9:00 I was up to 4,000 visits per hour, more than one per second. By 10:30 I had 8,000 visits. In a month I might get 9,000 visits and I got that in about 4 hours today. 541 diggs.

The page count has died down by now, but I did get over 9,000 visits Monday and 5,000 on Tuesday (a lot of that just after midnight). I was down to 1,000 on Wednesday which a week before would have been a record. Here is a graph of the week. Keep in mind that the previous Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday were pretty good days and Saturday and Sunday were record days before the big wave hit.

I got over 1100 diggs before it was over. Amazon sales over the 3-day period included 8 battery packs (about $6 in total commissions) and a $300 vacuum cleaner ($19 in commissions; I need a vacuum cleaner web page!). I also got 25 ad clicks from the battery page worth $9.

Does this mean you will be clearing over $500 per year in referral revenue? Do they take out taxes?

At some point we should consider promoting you as an official consumer advocate like Clark Howard.

My reluctance to buy early or buy many makes me a poor source of consumer news.

I'm okay this year taxwise because I got a late start. I'd have to make over $300 next quarter to have the income reported and there's no way that will happen. I'm not sure how taxes would work because I would think that buying iPod-related stuff and paying my internet fees might qualify as offsetting expenses, but it's much easier not having it reported. In 2007 if I get close to $600, I might either take the ads down or redirect the commission to someone else's account.

A couple of days ago I got a few hits from another instructables page (like the smart chick's) where a guy linked to the battery page in explaining his device, which seems to be battery pack circuitry packed not in an Altoids case, but in the case of a 9 volt battery. So then you snap a 9-volt battery to the battery pack and plug that in to the iPod. Except, his site isn't very clear and I think what he may have built is a headphone amplifier in a 9-volt case.

Anyway, just now I noticed I was up to 600 hits today. That was odd because traffic had started dying off. Then I saw 280 hits in the last hour. Apparently someone posted the 9-volt project including the link to my site on www.hackaday.com, which is kind of similar to Make:

Here we go again.

The hackaday traffic is dying down, but slowly because they only post one item per day and keep three weeks of posts on their home page. So the post that links to my page is still on the home page, but way down. I've also been getting a lot of referrals from www.stumbleupon.com which sounds similar to digg, but involves a browser toolbar that I don't want to download.

Anyway, I've made a graph of my web traffic for the last 30 days that shows the (relatively) small bump I got from Make: that led to a sharp but short-lived Digg spike and probably a subsequent longer-lived but much lower hackaday spike. With the additional traffic it is looking like I will get paid by AdSense in only 3 months instead of the more typical 5 months.