April 2022 closed out with 442,116 page views! It’s another “Best Month Since the Start of the Pandemic!” What this website earned & more highlights from April 2022…

May 1, 2022 — Sunday
April 2022 LeadSafeMama.com
Website Highlights & Future Goals

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#1) Best Month Since the Start of the Pandemic

This month was AGAIN the #BestMonthSinceTheStartOfThePandemic — passing March 2022 (for unique page views for the month), which had just earned that title the previous month (we’re on a roll)!

1. • Wouldn’t it be fun if every month from here on out was the #BestMonthSinceTheStartOfThePandemic, passing each previous month this year?!
   • For that to happen we would need to see average daily page views of at least 15,000 for the next several months, similar to what we saw for most of April (see chart below), which closed out at 14,737 average daily page views for the month.

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#2) A 30% Increase in Page Views Over March 2022

April 2022 saw 101,384 more page views than March of 2022 — nearly a 30% increase in page views!

While we’re thrilled about the increase in reach and impact of this work, we’re a bit disappointed (given the business has over $300,000 in debt related to our Federal civil rights legal battle to cover) that, surprisingly, the increase in traffic somehow only managed to translate into just $421.46 more in total website earnings than we saw in March — maybe someone can explain that math to me, as it seems a bit off.

• The website earned $7,917.80 in March (from all sources)
• In April, our total earnings from all website sources (advertising and affiliate income) were $8,339.26 (see main graphic above for breakdown)
• IF the increase in page views in April had produced a correlative increase in advertising income (reasonably proportional to the increase in page views), the website would/should have earned $10,273.35 in April — rather than $8,339.26. (Not that we’re unhappy about $8,339.26 — we’re thrilled, especially given that it represents post-pandemic financial recovery!)

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#3) Where things “should” be? (Maybe?) 

In April 2022 we learned (through the grapevine … a.k.a Facebook) that for some (cluster of?) unknown reason(s), this website earns considerably less (from advertising income) per page view than other websites. In fact, it seems that we earn about a quarter of what others may be earning for the same amount of work (as represented by content quality and quantity here on the website)!

• One person commented in a Facebook Group for folks who run websites that they can earn “$40,000 a month in advertising income from 1,000,000 page views a month.”
• In response to this comment, I looked at the LeadSafeMama.com numbers and calculated that — with less than one penny per page view during off-season-months (not the Christmas holiday season) — WE would need (a seemingly impossible) 5,000,000 page views each month to earn that hypothetical $40,000 a month from our advertising contract. And, during the holiday season (when we sometimes earn as much as two pennies per page view) we would need about 2,000,000 page views each month to earn that much (also unlikely — but perhaps not impossible on a very good month)!

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#4) Can we change this at all? To earn closer to what other websites are earning? (An experiment!)

It was a bit depressing to me (that we’re working more than twice as hard [4x as hard?] for our money over here than others are) — so I decided to experiment and tweak the advertising settings for the site a bit to see if it makes a detectable difference:

• Normally, we intentionally try to avoid certain types of ads here (specifically, trying to set the categories of “opt-out” preferences to omit industries that use Lead and/or directly harm people: hunting, tobacco, pesticides, etc., or are clearly heavy polluters, etc.).
• Today (in exploring the inquiry of “How can we make the income from this work cover all of the costs of the work?”), I changed the “opt-out” settings to allow ALL types of advertising just as an experiment — to see if it would make any difference in earned website income. This could mean you might see ads for tobacco, guns, and weedkiller in the coming days … so I apologize in advance!
• We should know the results of this little experiment pretty quickly (in the next couple of days, or a week on the outside).
• I am not necessarily planning on keeping those settings as they are now — but it will be an interesting experiment! 

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#5) How will we know if these changes made a difference?

• In April 2022 our per-page view earnings for our advertising contract alone worked out to .00995 — so, rounding up, just a little bit under one cent per page view. This is $4,400.13 — advertising income earned for the month, divided by 442,116 unique page views for the month.
• Yesterday (Saturday April 30, 2022) alone there were 10,805 page views, and the advertising contract earned us $110.46 for the day. So yesterday’s earnings were $110.46 divided by 10,805, or just a little over 1 cent per page view (.01022). 

Since we just changed the advertising settings today (5/1), today won’t count, but 5/2 (Monday) will be the first full day with our new advertising settings. As I understand it, it may also take a while for the change in settings to propagate through the system for our advertising contract, so we may not see a change for a few days. I will report back asap if I notice any difference in income (any significant jump over about 1 cent per page view). It’s a curious experiment, both from a financial and an ethical perspective!

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#6) Possibilities for the future…

If the dude who commented on Facebook was right (that 1,000,000 page views could result in $40,000 from advertising), with all my “opt-out” exceptions settings off, this might/could result in as much as four cents advertising income per page view — who knows? Time will tell!

Four cents per page view (just looking at April’s numbers) would have resulted in about $16,000 in advertising income alone (a big jump from $4,400!). A monthly increase that big could go a long way to paying the attorneys for our Federal case, and towards covering other important expenses like paying off the loan for our XRF Instrument refurbishment! That combined with our website earnings from other sources (another approx. $4,000) would hypothetically bring our monthly total for a month like April to $20,000 … meeting our long-term goal now!

Caveats/ Considerations:

A potential jump in income might only be expected if our advertising “opt-out” settings were the only factor depressing the advertising income levels on LeadSafeMama.com. It’s quite unlikely that this is the only reason our income per page view is lower (vs., for example, the income generated by, say, a non-controversial, gluten-free baking site with recipes!). Additional possible considerations impacting the rates advertisers pay for the ads you see on this site may be content and audience-related factors including:

1. We aren’t peddling anything (most of what we write tells people what not to buy, or what to throw out — and the algorithms don’t know what to make of that)!
2. The work here is fundamentally “controversial” and …
3. LeadSafeMama readers tend to be more savvy and discerning compared to “average consumers,” thus may be being hypothetically noted and assigned by the advertisers’ metrics/algorithms as “less likely to buy most of the stuff we advertise,” so our advertising space may be deemed as not as “valuable,” and may be priced at a lower rate.

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More to Share

There is so much more to report and share; April 2022 was a month FULL of milestones (many of which I reported earlier this month, in real-time as they happened!) — but I am a bit wiped out from parenting all weekend, so will return to this post tomorrow (fresh, in the morning) to update with additional thoughts!

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New Here? Some Background & Goals…

For those who are new here (or for those who are stumbling across a Lead Safe Mama stats update post for the first time), our current sustainability goal (the level of readership here on the website that will (should?) generate enough income to cover all of the costs of the work we do here) is 600,000 page views each month (average, across the year). This works out to a goal of 7,200,000 page views, annually.

• Our 2022 Goal for website-generated income is $10,000 each month — which would cover most of the base expenses for the business, including instrument costs for our consumer goods testing, general operating costs, website costs, and more.
• Our long-term financial goal is for the work of Lead Safe Mama, LLC to earn at least $20,000 a month (primarily from website-related income), which would give us enough of a stable funding base to move forward with growing, expanding, and implementing many of our pending projects for childhood Lead-poisoning prevention and consumer goods safety (while also making it possible for us to pay off debt related to our Federal civil rights case while the case winds its way through the courts and we await jury trial).

Thank you for being here. Thank you for supporting this work. Thank you for being part of the international conversation for childhood Lead poisoning prevention and consumer goods safety!

Tamara Rubin
#LeadSafeMama
Owner — Lead Safe Mama, LLC

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Here’s last month too, in case you want to compare!