Fat Stacks: $1,117,301 Revenue, $130,659 Expenses in 2021 From Unnamed Niche Sites Running on Display Ads

This one runs the other way.

It sells almost nothing. The page being viewed is what earns the money.

The niche-site portfolio run by Jon Dykstra recorded $1,117,301 in revenue and $130,659 in expenses over 2021.

That leaves $986,642. As a monthly average, it’s a pace of roughly $93,000 in revenue.

His April 2023 monthly report showed almost the same level: $93,676 in revenue and $11,505 in expenses.

Seven figures from blogging tends to conjure an image of stacked affiliate commissions.

Dykstra’s income runs the other way. The April 2023 report describes it as “Mediavine ads mostly plus a few thousand in affiliate revenue from a smattering of merchants.”

Nothing is sold, and no conversion is chased. Search traffic gets converted to cash as raw pageviews.

These numbers are the result of betting on that single point since 2012.

The $1,117,301 covers only the bottom layer of 16 sites

One clarification matters. The $1,117,301 is niche-site revenue.

Course sales and the Fat Stacks Blog itself are accounted separately and aren’t in that figure.

Per the About page, the portfolio consists of 16 sites, and he sometimes flips one.

So the business has two layers.

1. Bottom layer: the niche sites

   They turn search traffic into ad revenue.

2. Top layer: the teaching side

   The Fat Stacks blog, newsletter, and paid courses package that practice into teaching material.

This article’s numbers cover only the bottom layer.

Show every total, hide every coordinate

What makes this case interesting is the disclosure style.

Dykstra publishes revenue and expense totals every month. He never names a single site.

Traffic breakdowns, per-site figures, and content spend are explicitly reserved for paying course members.

Naming a niche site invites imitators and wholesale content theft.

For a business that lives on search rankings, that’s the same as publishing the coordinates of your revenue source.

Total-level transparency builds trust for the teaching business. Secrecy protects the asset underneath.

The line itself reads as defensive architecture for a search-traffic business.

As the About page puts it, his posture is to “Tell it like it is” about successes and failures alike. Within the disclosed range, the bad months are published too.

The only thing hidden is where the money is made.

Ads only means far more topics are fair game

The strength of the display-ad model is independence from conversions.

Even if a reader buys nothing, a rendered page earns money.

So topic selection depends only on whether search demand exists, not on whether a sellable product does. The writable territory expands by an order of magnitude.

Affiliate publishers can only farm the intersection of search demand and sellable products. An ad-funded site can monetize trivia or diagrams as long as people search for them.

The multi-site portfolio applies the same logic to risk. No single niche or site slump sinks the whole.

The cost side has its own design.

The 2021 expenses of $130,659 work out to about $10,900 a month, most of it presumably content production. By April 2023, monthly expenses were down to $11,505.

In that report Dykstra wrote that “thanks to Koala, my monthly content investment is far lower than it used to be.” He described a shift to a much smaller cadre of writers drafting with the AI tool Koala and finishing with editing.

Flat revenue still yields more take-home if costs drop.

In an ad-funded blog, the profit line is easier to move from the cost side than the revenue side.

“A real up-and-down business the last 12 months”

The reports keep their unflattering passages intact.

A structure built solely on search traffic is one that search-engine changes hit directly.

Fin vs Fin’s exit after a Google update cut profit 75% and the collapse of 10Beasts under a penalty show how businesses on the same ground fall.

What moved was not revenue but the $11,505 in monthly costs

What Fat Stacks’ numbers offer other ad-funded sites sits on the cost side, not the revenue side.

Monthly revenue in April 2023 was almost exactly the 2021 average. It didn’t move.

What Dykstra changed in the meantime was the makeup of expenses. For the $11,505 in April 2023, he writes that a small group of writers now drafts with Koala and finishes by editing.

With revenue flat for two years, the lever for protecting the margin was on the cost side.

That only works, though, when drafting alone is replaced and an editing stage still guarantees quality.

In the Japanese-language sphere, Unico Blog’s 15 months, which dropped AdSense for higher-value monetization, takes the opposite design. Reading the two together shows where the fork between staying with ads and abandoning ads sits.

The totals-public, breakdown-private line also stands only because the Fat Stacks blog’s courses exist. They’re a separate stream that turns transparency into trust.

The limits deserve their own space.

This business started in 2012, when search algorithms were looser and display-ad RPMs were climbing.

Sixteen sites’ worth of domain history and a decade of trial and error underpin today’s numbers. Assembling the same pieces in the 2020s wouldn’t draw the same curve.

All figures are self-published and unaudited.