A Difficult Year
I GREATLY VALUE honesty. I think it’s important to be scrupulously honest with others and brutally honest with ourselves. That brings me to HumbleDollar’s annual report card.
After steady growth over the site’s first five years, our sixth year—2022—saw mixed success. Below are five key metrics that I track. These numbers, I believe, tell you not only about HumbleDollar, but also a little about the mood of Americans over the past 12 months.
Pageviews. This is the number I watch most closely. In 2022, readers perused more than 4.7 million of the site’s pages, up from less than 4.4 million in 2021. That might seem like reasonable progress. But the fact is, the site saw handsome growth in last year’s first seven months, only for growth to stall out in August. In fact, pageviews in September, October and November were well below the same months in 2021.
Comments. This has been a high point. The number of comments posted in 2022 jumped more than 40% from 2021’s level. I’m a little surprised by how often commenters turn personal-finance questions into political debates, but maybe that’s unavoidable amid today’s hyper-partisan politics. Still, even with that, the comments posted are almost always fairly civil. Not sure how to comment? Click here.
Subscribers. In 2022, the number of folks receiving our twice-weekly newsletter grew 15%, from 16,000 to almost 19,000. If you aren’t already subscribed, you can sign up here for our free newsletter and here for our daily email alerts.
Advertising. Though the site’s pageviews were up 7% last year, total advertising revenue fell 9% compared to 2021. I hear occasional complaints about the quality of the ads, which often tout political causes or promote dating sites. The ads you see are automatically served up by Google AdSense, though I have some ability to restrict what sorts of ads get shown, and I’ve started to make greater use of those controls.
Donations. These are the site’s other source of revenue. Donations fell 16% last year. For those of you who donate, please know that your financial support is greatly appreciated.
What explains the site’s mixed success in 2022? I believe that, to some degree, it mirrors what’s been happening in the economy and the financial markets. As businesses braced for slower economic growth, and as readers grappled with falling financial markets and higher inflation, a hit to advertising and donations was perhaps inevitable.
Meanwhile, the grim financial news seems to have worn down some readers. By 2022’s second half, it appears their appetite for reading about personal finance had waned, in the same way many of us lost our appetite for checking our investment account balances, plus there was a heap of other news that folks were focused on, notably the war in Ukraine, Queen Elizabeth II's death and the U.S. mid-term elections. My hope: Once the stock and bond markets recover, so too will readership, donations and advertising rates.
I’ve long viewed HumbleDollar as a public service rather than a moneymaking venture. In fact, a few years back, I even explored turning the site into a nonprofit, but the administrative hassles involved deterred me. The upshot: I’m less bothered by the fall in donations and advertising dollars than by the sluggish growth in readership. Like most writers, I’m happy to make a few bucks—but what really makes me happy is having lots of readers.
While revenue and readers were hard to come by in 2022, the site continued to post plenty of great content, thanks to HumbleDollar’s talented collection of writers. We posted 30 essays in a series dubbed “My Money Journey.” Those essays will be published as a book in April. Intrigued? You might preorder the book from Amazon or directly from Harriman House, the publisher. Harriman is currently offering a 30% discount to HumbleDollar readers. Use the code HDMMJ30 at checkout. If U.S. buyers select economy shipping, the mailing charge should be just $4.
Our other big new initiative in 2022 was the Two-Minute Checkup, a quick-and-easy financial tool that aims to provide feedback across a user’s entire financial life based on just nine inputs. The Checkup was unveiled in early August. Based on the feedback, we posted a revamped version in November. Almost 30,000 folks have now tried the calculator, but I’d love to see the Checkup used even more widely. Please share this link with friends and family—or just tell them to go to TwoMinuteCheckup.com—and also encourage them to sign up for our free newsletter.
In early November, eight HumbleDollar writers—all of whom live in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, except Adam Grossman, who flew in from Boston—gathered in Philadelphia for lunch. It was a great success. Yes, there was some talk about the site and personal finance. But mostly, the writers were just happy to meet one another in person.
That got me thinking that perhaps HumbleDollar should hold a conference for the site’s readers. Conferences, of course, can be big moneymakers, but that’s not my goal. Indeed, I’d want to minimize the cost to participants, so it wouldn’t be a deterrent to attending.
My initial thought: How about a conference in Philadelphia that offers perhaps six hours of sessions over two mornings, with afternoons free for site seeing, and lunchtime and evenings available for socializing? The sessions would include some guest speakers and a chance to ask questions of your favorite writers. There would be a charge to cover the renting of a conference room, breakfast, a coffee service and perhaps the cost of a guest speaker or two, but the rest—lunch and dinner, hotel rooms, travel—would be up to attendees.
Even a modest conference like this would be a big undertaking, but it would be worthwhile if there was a lot of enthusiasm. Is there? Let me know in the comment section below whether you’d be interested in attending and perhaps even helping out with the organizing.
I just turned 60. Readers are often surprised that I’m not older. But remember, I was just 31 years old when I started writing my column for The Wall Street Journal, so I’ve been at this for a long time—perhaps too long, at least according to my detractors. Will I retire, some readers have asked? At this juncture, I have no plans to ride off into the sunset. My goal is to keep HumbleDollar going for many more years, though I plan to cut back the number of articles posted, so my days aren't quite so busy.
Jonathan Clements is the founder and editor of HumbleDollar. Follow him on Twitter @ClementsMoney and on Facebook, and check out his earlier articles.The post A Difficult Year appeared first on HumbleDollar.
