IntroCave April: $4,326
Revenue Breakdown
Revenue was essentially flat (technically down 1% month-over-month, but up 2.3% daily average because April has 30 days).
- Sales: $2691
- Ads: $1636
New Render Backend
Around mid-month, I started an A/B test with my new almost-3-years-in-the-making render architecture. I've been running traffic through it 50/50 with the old renderer.
It's been kind of a rocky month stability-wise as I've rolled all this out, but the results are encouraging. Average render time has dropped from 153 seconds to 83 seconds.
I thought that would have a bigger effect on conversion rates than it did, but it's kind of a weird test. Taking 50% of the load off of the old servers has also sped them up and made them a lot more stable, so the fact that the two systems are running even is a pretty big improvement.
Anecdotally, support volume is down.
My end-of-month push was more intense than usual. I've been pushing out content for the old renderer and then updating those videos to the new system the following week, but with both systems going I had to do a lot more testing/processing than usual. I'm hoping this is the last month I have to prep any videos on the old system, as the new one is significantly faster/easier (I still need to migrate ~20 templates over from the old system, though).
Possibly Premature Goal Check:
- ☑️ Faster renders
- ☐ Improved conversion rate (TBD)
- ☑️ Easier to release/update content
- ☑️ Easier to manage servers
- ☑️ Fewer support requests
PageSpeed
I did another big round of page speed optimizations, and I ended up removing ads entirely on mobile. I expect ad revenue to go down a few hundred dollars next month, but I wasn't making enough on mobile ads to justify slowing down the speed scores.
If I can get ARPU up on desktop users (coming soon: subscriptions, 4k video), I'll eventually get rid of all the ads on the site.
