2022 draws to a close. With it, comes the worst-performing year for my investment portfolio and side project income.
For December, I saw only $498 in side project income, and an investment portfolio downturn of -11.54% just in value loss.
Now that the entire year is in review, we finished December with a gross revenue of $8681, which was my worst-performing year of the past three years. For reference, I did $16k in 2021 and $11k in 2020.
- $152 in Youtube ad revenue, showing a slight improvement over last month as some recent improvements in videos make their presence known in the metrics
- $141 in 2D print-on-demand artwork sales via mostly Redbubble, and a bit of Society6
- $78 via Nicehash mining earnings
- $35 in MyMiniFactory 3D model sales
- $25 in Signum token mining income and value gain
- $17 from Shapeways 3D print-on-demand sales
- $15 in flipping sales (lol)
- $15 in Amazon affiliate sales via Youtube video descriptions
- -$0.42 in Lbry token value loss
- -$4.38 in Binance holdings value loss
Before we break down December specifically, let's consider this past year as a whole.
Nicehash was doing pretty well in the first half of 2022, but petered out as ETH switched to proof-of-stake, and my GPUs continued to age out. In 2023, I don't expect the Nicehash earnings to be much of a player at all in the side project income totals
The next highest individual line item, Youtube, will not only be the biggest one for 2023, but I now predict it will be hugely so. The ad revenue will be pretty spectacular. As the channel grows, with it, I also expect the Amazon affiliate income line item to grow with it, and stay roughly on track to 15% to 20% of the ad revenue.
I aim to grow my 3D print sales to a reasonable entry in the income contributors. I also want to continue to steadily grow my 3D model & 3D print on demand sales at a steady rate.
December specifically:
Let's start with the Cryptocurrency side of things:
The market saw a flash crash one of the days this week, which unfortunately saw all my holdings take a dump that they still haven't recovered from--and this has caused my GCTT bot to be currently sitting at -17.69%. Now, it hasn't been making lossy trades--this crash is just from coins it happened to be exposed to when the market took a sudden steep nosedive. The actual trades themselves--other than the initial trades out of the coins where the flash-crash happened--haven't been lossy for the most part. The AUTO algo selection seems to be doing its part, hopefully the bot can recover from this flash crash by the end of January. I may restart it with the newer updated version of my bot with more algos to choose from.
Signum saw a huge jump this month! I'm surprised. With the value gain and the amount of tokens I've mined, the value really shot up, and is the only positive change across my entire portfolio...
I haven't worked on the GCTT too much from a development perspective, as I haven't had much interest in it by people, and no new affiliate signups.
Now let's jump over to Youtube land, where I've had some of the biggest positive changes this past month. Take a look at the four spikes at the end of this 365 day lookback which correspond with my last four published videos.
I had a recent 'aha' moment (well, more like a few) about why my videos have been underperforming. I had been doing a bunch of research and a few things finally clicked. These improvements have made my last few videos perform well and above what the last year of videos has done. My last four videos have all consistently been my #1 performing video out of the last 10 published, as tracked by Youtube on the Studio screen. Just one is luck, but all four have seen this--across several different sub-topics, too. Including electric skateboarding, which is typically a poor-performing sub-topic on my channel.
The three main contributing factors to this sudden and extreme trend reversal are as such:
- Video specificity--I need to make videos watchable by a larger audience. Skatepacking tutorial videos are an ultra-specific target of people who are into electric skateboards, who are also into backpacking, and also interested in combining the two. Instead, pull back and make skatepacking videos that are enjoyable/useful to anybody interested in electric skateboards, whether or not they are into backpacking or the outdoors.
- Keyword spread--I was going too wide with my SEO keywords. By combining stuff like 'electric skateboards' AND 'backpacking', the video would go too wide to an audience profile that isn't too receptive to the video, and it would die in the algorithm. Instead, by focusing just on the 'electric skateboarding' side of things and removing any SEO that could target the outdoors niche audience, it is going to the right audience. This lightbulb moment was spent by thinking about who I was targeting my video for, versus who was actually clicking on my video, by studying the most popular search terms that led to my video.
- Title & thumbnail optimization--remove keyword stuffing from the title, and just have the main targeted keyword, plus organizing the title in a way to promote the most curiosity when combined with the thumbnail image & text. I finally understand the 'gap' between the title & thumbnail that people talk about.
With this, and the consistent vast improvement I've seen over my last few videos, I'm going into 2023 with a LOT more optimism about the Youtube channel.
My goal for the end of 2023 is 25,000 subscribers.
Let's look at December's metrics so you can see the changes already affecting them:
- Published 5 videos, staying on track with one a week (last video was published early than normally scheduled to coincide with New Years Eve)
- Finished December with 7,097 subscribers; up 192 over last month
- Subscriber growth rate: 2.8%, up from last month's 2.1%; showing the early signs of what I think will be a huge trend reversal in a major way
- Average daily views throughout December: 708, up from last month's 554; or an increase of 27.8%
- Average daily subscriber count: 7, up from last month's 5
To reach my target goal of 25,000 subscribers by the end of 2023, I will need to average a monthly subscriber growth rate of 11.1%. A big jump over current numbers, but doable, I think, with recent improvements and my focus on a unique & unifying niche.
Here's the breakdown of what the sub & daily view count should look like at this growth rate by the end of each month:
- January: 7,884 subs, 786 daily views
- February: 8,759 subs, 873 daily views
- March: 9,732 subs, 970 daily views
- April: 10,812 subs, 1,078 daily views
- May: 12,012 subs, 1,198 daily views
- June: 13,346 subs, 1,331 daily views
- July: 14,827 subs, 1,479 daily views
- August: 16,473 subs, 1,643 daily views
- September: 18,302 subs, 1,825 daily views
- October: 20,333 subs, 2,028 daily views
- November: 22,590 subs, 2,253 daily views
- December: 25,098 subs, 2,503 daily views
The Tesla Model 3 definitely seems to be a hit on my channel. As proof that my videos are doing really well, here's a live snapshot of my video data over the last 60 minutes:
The last bit of stuff I wanted to touch on was my Shopify 3D print shop--I've finally turned that back on and have been promoting it on my channel. It breaks away from the whole 'passive income' mantra, but in order to fund a lot of the projects for my channel I need to get some short-term revenue to fund the long-term passive income from Youtube.
Okay, let's take a look at the work items I set forth for December, and how I handled them:
- 5x Mike in the Woods Youtube Videos (four primary plus one end-of-year New Years update)
Completed! - Maintain 207 active Flipping Listings (upped count from GPUs listed)
Completed! - Electric Snowboard Build:
- Order metal bracket inserts for motor mounting arms from Shapeways
Completed! - Perform downhill durability testing (Nikola Motors test)
Did a little bit--still waiting on metal inserts to arrive - Wrap up odds & ends of build like waxing, water-sealing exposed innards
Moved to January's to-do list - Order replacement motor
Completed! - Continue to monitor Binance affiliate signups to gauge when to move forward with GCTT version 0.4.0 development
No interest shown, minimal development done
Overall, kept pretty solid on the task track. Now, let's take a look at what I want to accomplish in January:
- 4x Mike in the Woods Youtube Videos
- Maintain 207 active Flipping listings
- Electric Snowboard Build:
- Swap motor mount arms to metal reinforcing bracket inserts
- Perform downhill durability testing
- Wrap up odds & ends of building like waxing, water-sealing exposed innards
- Continue to monitor Binance affiliate signups to gauge when to move forward with GCTT version 0.4.0 development & release
- Begin porting Shopify 3D print catalogue to Ebay & Bonanza
- Break even on Shopify monthly cost with 3D print sales, preferrably make a profit
Investment portfolio look-see:
As you can see, I saw a pretty significant drop across my entire portfolio. Not even any withdrawals this time, this is all just portfolio value loss from both crypto and stocks crashing hard.
For weighting:
Because crypto is more volatile than stocks and goes up & down more severely based on market direction, you can see my weighting has gone even more in favor of stocks this month, to the tune of almost 2/3.
And finally, a look at my FIRE income tracker, where I calculate my total monthly revenue plus the monthly portion of my 4% annual withdrawal rate of my investments. Still small, but a slight improvement over last month at least. With Youtube starting to do well, I'm interested to see what this chart looks like at the end of 2023, or even in a couple months' time:
If you find these posts helpful, and you are interested in cryptocurrency, try signing up for Binance! It's a widely-known cyrptocurrency exchange (think stock exchange, but for crypto). It's free to do so, and by using my referral link we'll both earn 10% of any trading fees you pay.
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