I make $500 a month from adsense... and keep none.

On any given month, I make an average of $500 from Google Adsense alone. This type of "passive income" is supposed to be free money, right? Right? That's what all the internet told me. Well, I did a little investigating to see where it all really goes, and I'm finding that, well, it gets eaten by the expenses monster!

$30/month or $600 per year for domain names.
I have about 60-70 different domains. GoDaddy costs about $8-$9 per domain. Other domain hosts might be cheaper, but GoDaddy's free DNS service is both reliable and flexible - so that matters a lot. Some of the "cheap domain" services charge for custom DNS settings or to update email routing settings.

$150 a month for hosting.
We pay for premium bandwidth and servers using Amazon EC2. It's not cheap, but damn is it reliable. During the great Anonymous hack-a-thons that brought down major websites like those of Visa and Mastercard, Amazon was the only hosting company to never falter.

$40 a month for reserved instance.
I paid a one-time fee of $1,500 to cover three years of reserved instance. It's an Amazon EC2 thing. Without it the monthly hosting would be ~$270 a month instead.

$50 a month for press releases and advertising.
I usually use Fiverr to get press releases submitted to some of the bigger sites. I also sometimes buy advertising on other websites to get more links and more users.

$200 a month for advertising at conventions.
Each convention costs about $200 for room+food, and I do at least 6 that are mostly for the websites instead of for the conventions. Then other times we actually buy physical advertising in program books, and we have to pay to get flyers printed and stuff too. Fortunately a box of 5,000 flyers is still only about $150. Every 5,000 flyers probably translates into only 100-200 new users.

$30 a month for computing expenses.
I set aside a little bit every month for computing expenses. Programming is a lot slower without three monitors, or without the software I need. This money goes towards things like that regularly.

Most of these expenses increase as adsense income goes up. More visitors? Pay more for hosting so that you can handle them all. The good thing, though, is that some of them don't increase linearly. I should still be able to handle most of the programming myself, and I don't really need to buy any more domain names - so as time goes on, I might actually have extra money to take, I don't know, a vay.... what do you call those... vay cay shun?

(My earlier trip to Tokyo was 90% work. Learning Japanese and doing all the things we're supposed to represent at conventions is hard... okay, it was terribly fun. Still, took a lot of notes on the Maid Cafes and Karaoke.)
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