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Wednesday
Mar132013

Mailbag: Are We There Yet? (When to start monetizing)

DateWednesday, March 13, 2013 at 11:00AM

Q.: I applied for a Project Wonderful ad box last night, and now I'm having misgivings. I wanted to hop on the ad train for a good handful of reasons:

  1. My pageviews are consistently between 100 and 600 every day (meaning we're potentially losing out on revenue)
  2. I get mentioned/plugged once every 3 months or so, and it's always a bummer not to benefit financially from the giant influx of readers (even if it's only for a day or two)
  3. My goal was always to host ads eventually, and we don't want people to get too comfy with our unblemished Web site
  4. As I do more and more work on the Web site itself, I want to design around the presence of ad boxes, especially if I have one up in the banner area since the whole layout will sit lower than it does currently.
  5. Ideally, comic stuff should be paid with comic money, and if the comic isn't making money, I shouldn't spend money improving it. But a longtime goal has been to hire someone to build us a really slick website, and it would be nice to have a little trickle of money coming in towards that.
Green as we are, all of this seems logical to me (I'll welcome any evidence to the contrary). But then I got to thinking... if I'm making money, it's got to be taxed. And all that means that I'd formally be a business. So wouldn't I need to apply for a business license, and a whole load of other things? It sounds like I would based on this discussion I found in the archives. 

So I guess my question is...am I there yet? Am I in a position to legitimately worry about ads, and is earning a scant $10 a month on our piddly pageviews worth the trouble?

 

A.: I agree with everything you said. And I'll add this Forum discussion for more helpful information -- especially this checklist submitted by one of the members. But it's not as overwhelming as it sounds, so don't panic!

I'm going to copy-paste it below, but I'll add that you'd be well-served by sitting down with a trusted CPA before you do anything, abd bring this list with you to discuss it -- in case there's anything they can add or alert you to. (Here's a thread for sharing infiormation on good CPAs by geographical region, if you need it.)

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AuthorBrad Guigar | Comments Off |