It seems like it was only yesterday that three people — myself, Dave Caolo, and Kelly Hodgkins — found ourselves out of a job at The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) and started Apple World Today with the hopes that we could continue the tradition of TUAW. Now it’s down to Dennis Sellers and myself running the show, but we’re still here. This is a “State of the Website” post to let you know how we’re doing after four years (we went live on February 9, 2015).
Things are a little better financially than they have been in the past three years…but at a cost. As AWT readers are well aware, we have had to resort to a lot of advertising to bring in something approaching a minimum wage. That advertising includes video from Primis, Google Ads, a number of affiliates, the AWT Deals Shop, and more.
Our original goal was to bring you the news, reviews and how-tos without ads. We started with a Patreon campaign, then went to what we called Team AWT. Although we have a few people still supporting us through Patreon and Team AWT, for the most part we need the ads to stay alive.
Our income from Patreon and Team AWT has fallen over $1,000 per month since 2015. Perhaps Scarlett O’Hara (“Gone With The Wind”) was able to depend on the kindness of strangers, but that’s not true for us. Judging from Patreon’s home page, the only true successes seem to be millennials who are writing bad plays, making worse music, or making self-indulgent podcasts. Nobody seems to want to pay a couple of old guys to write Apple articles. So, like it or not, ads are here to stay.
What else should you expect in 2019? Probably more video. I’ve been personally spending a lot of time over the past month working on getting ready to bump out a video or two each week, so you’ll start seeing those soon. Our hope is that the videos can also be syndicated through Primis for additional income.
That “more video” may come at the expense of AWT TV, which gets very few views and even fewer live followers. Perhaps moving to live-streaming after a few major Apple events might be a better way to gain an audience, so the next time Apple has something important scheduled we’ll look into that. As much as Marty Edwards and I enjoy chatting about tech, we’re about our only audience!
As many of you know, a lot of what we do is dependent on your input. For example, it took just one vision-impaired reader to get us to add the WebsiteVoice tool to Apple World Today so she could listen to the articles. We hope that this helps many others who have difficulty seeing to get their daily fill of Apple goodness.
If you have any ideas, complaints, suggestions, or just want to say something that’s been on your mind, send us an email at info@appleworld.today.
Thank you for four years of reading the site, and we hope that four years from now we’re still able to keep you informed and entertained.
