Freeloaders vs. Payloaders

So as threatened, I have run the numbers. How cheap ARE you people? I added up all donations, digital sales and CD sales for each month, and divided that by the total downloads per month to come up with $/download (T-shirt sales are so far not a factor). This is not totally accurate, I’m just using the total bandwidth per month as my number, which is obviously not all song downloads. But since the average page view is orders of magnitude smaller than a single song download, I’m going to guess that more accurate numbers wouldn’t make much of a difference. Are you ready? Everyone should take a guess before reading on – how much per song do you think I get?

These numbers are in cents. The first one is gross, the second one is net (after iTunes, PayPal and Amazon get their cut).

Jan: 3.3/1.9
Feb: 1.4/0.8
Mar: 4.3/2.5
Apr: 3.0/1.8
May: 5.4/3.8
Jun: 3.2/1.5

Average: 3.4/2.1

So what do you think – more or less than you expected? I’m actually surprised how big those numbers are, I didn’t think I was going to be able to express these in cents. At current traffic levels, this doesn’t make me wealthy, or even offset all my expenses. And it’s a far cry from the $.99 everyone so happily spends at iTunes and elsewhere. But it’s more than I thought it was going to be considering how much I give away.

And now we will speak of money no more…