Feb 25th, 2009
State of the Blog, February 2009
It’s February 2009. The stock market looked to be stabilizing but this week the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit its lowest point in many years. The country is in the midst of an official (if not fitting the classical definition) recession. The inflation rate is essentially negative, unemployment is up, and consumer sentiment is down.
We do feel it here at Uncommon Cents. Our subscriber rate is steady at about 200 RSS subscribers, and we get about another 100 Web based visits daily on the Web site. While I’d like to have more, that’s still a great number! But sponsorship is down; several of our sponsors have ended their agreements and even Google Adsense revenue (which was not all that much in the first place) is down considerably.
I’m guessing this is how the recession is hitting bloggers and Web sites. Fortunately this is far from my sole source of income (or even in my top three streams), but it’s not thrilling to know.
Still, this is the time to build value; to work on doing the best work I can. After all, on a per hour basis, this is unquestionably the lowest paying thing I do. But it’s lots of fun, it’s growing, and it’s making me a little money while doing it, so I’ll keep doing it. Hope all is well with you and yours in this difficult economy!
[...] It’s been awhile since I’ve done a State of the Blog address. In that one (just a few months ago), things were very bleak in the economy, and the blog itself wasn’t doing all that well financially (and I also theorized that the same was happening with other blogs). [...]