TonyJiang.com: Fifth Year on the Net

Tonyjiang.com has been on the net for half a decade.

Writing that sentence makes me feel old, but at the same time I do feel a sense of accomplishment for keeping my domain online for five years. Due to my busy life of being a graduate student, I really haven’t done much to my website in the 2010-2011 period, but that doesn’t mean that there is nothing worth noting down. For one thing, traffic and ad revenue underwent some substantial growth. Read on to find out the details.

As I mentioned in the opening blurb, I am now a graduate student actively engaged in research, and this means I have even less free time than when I was an undergrad. This is one of the reason why there weren’t any major changes to my websites in the last year. The other reason is that a lot of the heavy lifting has already been done last year. I still make a post on my website every once in a while and keep my all the maintenance and backup, but otherwise there were no major developments last year.

Despite the lack of big changes though, my websites actually saw some substantial growth in terms of traffic and ad revenue area. This summer marks the first time ever that that my three core websites (this blog, Crabbing Guide and my Smash Bros. Guide) averaged more than 1000 page views per day. Even better, July 2011 is the first month where my monthly ad earnings was above $100. Yeah, I know $100 per month isn’t exactly impressive and tons of websites make way more than that, but it’s a record for my sites and I’m proud of it. Leading the way of the growth is the Crabbing Guide, my first (started 8 years ago) and still most profitable website. I guess crabbing must have sudden gotten more popular this summer. I always see increase in traffic and earnings in previous summers, but never to the level of this summer.

Moving to some overall statistics and milestones, the three core websites have moved passed 1 million page views and are moving ever closer to the 500,000 unique visitors mark. Including the Badminton Portal and Travel Log, my websites have drawn 150,000 unique visitors and 270,000 page views in the past year measuring from anniversary to anniversary. These numbers represent a solid growth compared to 2009-2010’s 130,000 unique visits and 230,000 page loads and again set a new benchmark my sites. The biggest growth though is in ad earnings, and this year my sites generated ~$840 in revenue compared to last year’s $630. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to live off my websites, but more income is always welcome.

It’s been another year of growth for my websites, and hopefully this trend will continue. I’ll do my best to keep my sites up to date, and if I’m up to it introduce some new changes and improvements. Thanks for reading.

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