Cost of doing business for new webmasters

Do you know what it really costs to run your online porn business? A lot of webmasters do not and they are the ones that never seem to be able to break from the “occasional sale every few months” group into the “where are my sales today?” group.

It’s called SBP–Standard Business Perception. Any business has cost rules and the internet is no exception. Let’s say you own 1 site or blog on one domain. What are your yearly operating costs?

The domain itself. Depending on where you register the name at you are looking at 7.99 to 10.99 a year for the name. Let’s assume you go the cheap route.

Privacy registration. It usually costs anywhere from 5.00 to 15.00 a year to cloak your identity. Not everyone needs this but if you are one of those people who don’t want to risk someone looking up dirtynastysex.com and finding you as the owner it is necessary. Again–assume you go the least expensive.

Hosting. You have to have that domain somewhere. Plans can run from 6.99 a month to 29.99 a month depending on your needs. Again–we will assume your needs are met by the lower price. That’s 83.88 a year for hosting.

So your obvious costs, domain, privacy and hosting are going to run you 96.87 a year.

But you have to consider the incidental costs as well.

Your internet connection. Sure–you would likely have the internet anyway but you have to look at it as a cost since you are using it to conduct business. Average highspeed broadband connection is 49.95 a month. You have to assume that 1/2 of that is the responsibility of your business. That’s 24.98 a month ( 299.76 a year).

Your time. The arguement is always that you would be doing nothing if you were not doing this but that does not play. You are doing this to make money. If you were working a part time job to make money you would be making miminum wage. You have to value the time you spend doing this at the same rate. I don’t know about where you live but here the miminum wage is 7.00 an hour. Let’s assume you spend 5 hours working on your site a week. That’s 35.00 worth of your time that you have invested. That’s 1820.00 a year.

Incidental costs are therefore 2119.76 a year.

Finally non-fixed costs. Namely taxes. Tax rates vary from state to state and depend on total income but let’s assume the lowest bracket will be in play. That is 10%. Since the average “part-time” webmaster makes 2 sales a month and averages 15.00 per sale that is 360.00 a year in sales. Tax liability would be 36.00.

It actually costs you to run that one site on that one domain: 96.87, 2119.76, and 36.00. That is 2252.63 a year operating costs. That breaks down to 187.72 a month. The more important figure for budgeting and planning is the operating cost per day based on a yearly projection. That is 6.18.

That is the amount you need to generate per day to cover your costs. It averages out to one sale at 15.00 every two days (approx).

Of course everyone’s figures will be different. Some will be higher some lower. The average wage where you live can affect the number greatly. But the example above will be damn close for the US webmaster. If you live in the US and you are not making 200.00 in generated income a month you are losing money. Use the little form below to calculate your true cost of operation.

Spent yearly on domains:____________
Spent yearly on privacy:_____________
Spent yearly on hosting:_____________
1/2 your yearly internet cost:__________
Hours worked X average local wage:_________
Estimated taxes:____________________