Is The Trend My Friend?

Another month comes to a close, and that means it's time for the traditional monthly ad revenue update.  Last month, I boldly predicted that ad revenue would continue to double every month as it did from March to April.  I kept myself in suspense all month, resisting the urge to occasionally glace at the Blogger Earnings report.  This morning was the big reveal...at the end of May, was the trend still my friend?

Sadly, the answer was a resounding "no."  Today marks the close of three months of non-stop, adventure-filled blogging.  If Away From The Cubicle were a publicly traded company, I would be filing my 10-Q report at the end of my first quarter of operations. (Is it obvious that work is at the forefront of my mind?)  Unfortunately, at this point my stock would also be suffering a Facebook-style downward spiral, as revenue growth fell off sharply in May.

Before getting into the details, I'm going to focus on the good news.  Through April, I'm more than half way to my goal:

That's almost $53 in the bank (well, Google's bank for now), not including revenue from May.  Like I said, that's the good news...less impressive is the lack of explosive growth that I predicted last month.  Once again, let's go to the classic woefully undersized chart:

Unless you click on the graph, that's incredibly difficult to read.  But you don't need hawk-like vision to see that the green bar in May is barely taller than the green bar in April.  Away From The Cubicle pulled in around $24 for the month. Not bad, but that revenue plateau would have even the most optimistic analysts downgrading my stock from "Strong Buy" to "Hold."  The really tragic news is the complete lack of a blue bar for Passionately Apathetic.  For the first month in its two year history, Passionately Apathetic got shut out like John Tesh at the Grammy's.

I refuse to be deterred, however, and will continue to focus on the good news.  Once May's revenue shows up in the unpaid earnings total, I'll be more than 75% of the way to my $100 milestone:

With three months behind me, it's looking like the earnings trajectory is a little more tortoise than hare...a little more Microsoft than Apple...a little more Malibu than Porsche. 

This little setback threatens to push back my early retirement by decades...but in the short term, I have a new goal: I'm within striking distance of the $100 payout mark, so I'd like to ride this plateau all June long and report back at the end of next month that I'm a professional writer. Then I can take my first paycheck and treat myself to a replacement hubcap, making the Malibu a little more Porsche-like.  From there, I'm confident that things will turn around nicely, and ad revenue will continue it's meteoric rise.  Stay tuned!