Second Quarter Report

Amazon sales remained down, so it’s not quite as much fun to do a quarterly report. Still, there are some interesting surprises. I only have the one page with AdSense ads. It is getting about 40 ad clicks per month out of 2,000 page views with the result being about $3 in revenue per month. It’s a long way to a $100 deposit.

In May I thought my troubles were over as I sold 29 items with Amazon compared to 6 the month before. But in June I sold a miserable 5 items, though part of that was because 3 books purchased in May were returned, so 5 items was my net. For the quarter the total was 40 items with a price of $730.69 and a commission for me of $35.35.

The biggest seller was the Turbo Charge iPod charger with 5 sales, though last quarter I had 11 sales. The most expensive item anyone bought was a radon gas detector for $120, so I got $7.20 as a commission. The most unusual item was a handful of books on trauma including 4 copies of one book plus a couple of other trauma titles and a Ham radio book too. Three copies of that one book were returned.

I am also still getting money each month for ads on my iPod pages and right now that is more than Amazon and AdSense revenues combined.

SunriseXP and Plucker

Today is the day that AvantGo became AvantGone. I was looking for a replacement and found a discussion about the topic. The simplest replacement seemed to be MobiPocket. This used to be a $20 piece of software for reading e-books, but Amazon bought the company and now it is free. Though they want you to buy e-books from their store, they also let you set up RSS feeds for free. I knew nothing about RSS feeds, so this morning I downloaded the software and tried to figure it out. I found some RSS feeds for the New York Times, Space.com, and The Economist and sychronized. Eventually it seemed to be working okay and I was off to work. But when I went to read the articles, the ones from Space.com were good (though a little jumbled with text for credit and ads), but the Times and Economist were just headlines. I guess headlines work fine if you add them to your My Yahoo home page, but not for offline reading.

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