Transparency Report: 2024
2024 has drawn to a close at The New Oil. Here’s how things went for us.
2024 Goals
Last years goals were mostly not met, but I think some of them had some legitimate reasons. Let me start with Namecheap. It turns out, Namecheap doesn’t simply rent standalone VPS’s, they rent one VPS per domain. Which means if I wanted to switch to Namecheap for VPS hosting (which I said was a goal last year to cut costs), I would’ve had to buy differing domain names to go with each service rather than use subdomain.thenewoil.org which is what I prefer to do. This not only goes counter to how I want to operate things, but would also raise prices to the point of probably being more expensive than before.
As promised, I shuttered all my communities in 2024 – which has been fantastic for my mental health and bandwidth – and have since shifted focus on hosting platforms. I briefly dabbled in Matrix, however the documentation is complex and assumes a level of tech literacy that I lacked at the time, and I didn’t have the time to dedicate to getting up-to-speed. Mastodon and PeerTube, however, have been successful. I also ran into funding issues pretty quickly: spinning up multiple services on VPS turns out to be pretty expensive. I’ll talk more about that in this year’s goals at the end.
My other major attempt was to be more consistent with video production. This started off pretty strong in the first half of the year, but got derailed very hard in the second half of the year. In June I started working on what would turn out to be a 33-minute behemoth of a video about privacy and democracy. At the same time, I had some other personal life changes that sucked up a lot of my time. This resulted in the video taking about 3-4 months to publish. Once I finally began to get more organized after that period of time, I was faced with another onslaught of difficulties: health problems and day-job-related travel. All in all, this caused my production pace to grind to a halt, even going so far as to impact Surveillance Report consistency. Thank you all for your patience during that time.
One smaller goal panned out well: keeping Crowdin updated. Thanks to my amazing web devs Rik and Jaden as well as Jonah from Privacy Guides who gracious lent his time a few times with some things like our Onion service and Caddy and making it all play nice. Huge thanks to all three of them. I still suck at updating Open Collective, but hopefully these transparency reports make up for that.
Growth
| Service | 2023 | 2024 | Growth |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mastodon | 8,133 | 9,218 | 13% |
| Bluesky | 64 | 166 | 159% |
| Blog (followers) | 48 | 55 | 15% |
| Blog (subscribers) | 97 | 119 | 23% |
| YouTube | 5,610 | 7,095 | 26% |
| PeerTube | 93 | 128 | 38% |
| TikTok | 556 | 575 | 3% |
| Loops | NA | 11 | NA |
| Website (total) | 145,026 | 155,807 | 7% |
There’s a few notes I have on the numbers this year. For starters, it’s worth noting that I accidentally nuked a bunch of stats from the first quarter of the year when I migrated from Namecheap to 1984 (and thus, Umami) for tracking visitors. Based on trends, I’d say that’s at least another 10-15k per month, which puts our actual number of visitors closer to 185-200k this year. For the sake of verifying my claims, I’ll operate on actual numbers and not guesses, but that’s still pretty nice growth regardless.
Again, most platforms saw significantly less attention overall than I would’ve liked from me this year, which I think was a contributing factor to the slower growth. That said, this was a year of education, experimentation, and growth. This year I experimented a lot more with titles – mostly via Surveillance Report where I can get feedback faster since we put out videos weekly – and you can see the difference between (for example) my “5 Everyday Benefits of Privacy & Security” video which should be renamed but currently sits at 1.6k views, versus my latest video “The Invisible Way You Can Be Tracked Online” which already has 3.3k at only a month old. Likewise, my PWA video (“Is THIS the Future of Mobile Apps?”) has over 6k. I also dramatically increased my editing and production quality – again which can be seen in my latest video where I tried a lot of new tricks like displaying important definitions on screen and trying new effects to show screenshots and the like. This also included refining my video-scripting process as I learned a lot about how to properly structure a video. I would also like it to be noted that I applied this same thinking to my blog posts. While I’m hoping to continue to learn more and improve my overall content creation game, I’m proud of the fact that I was able to boost my blog post readership from a few hundred per post to nearly a thousand per post in most cases.
For TikTok, it’s worth noting that I simply didn’t have the time to dedicate like I would’ve liked. I did try experimenting a bit – I’ve tried doing shorts of YouTube videos, and I tried doing a daily news segment. Neither seem quite as effective as simply posting when I have something unique to say, and unfortunately recording a 5 minute video – simply recording – means at least 30 minutes of setup time (since I don’t have a space where I can just leave the lights and camera up and ready to go 24/7), and then I have to send it off to the editor and since they’re not paid I don’t rush them. It just hasn’t been a priority with my limited attention, and even less now that there’s a possible ban incoming (though personally I still suspect that’s unlikely).
The last note I have is Bluesky: While Bluesky saw growth this year, it’s worth noting that technically it’s been rebooted. I tried out Bluesky for a while, but I never saw much engagement and at the time I was really struggling to find a way to fit it into my workflow where it didn’t create significantly extra work for me. I tried paid bridges, one reader even graciously created a script for me I could run on a Raspberry Pi, but ultimately there was nothing that justified the time expenditure. Between this and the low engagement, I ultimately decided to delete Bluesky. But then, I stumbled on Bridgy Fed, which allows you to freely and seamlessly bridge to Bluesky (or vice versa, or a bunch of other methods). After several months of use and getting the hang of it, I set the username back to the official thenewoil.org handle and this now seems to be a convenient way of managing Bluesky with no additional work on my end. So while we did see growth, it’s likely less than it should’ve been because of that several-month reset (and my lack of setting a proper handle).
Finances
| Category | 2023 | 2024 | Growth |
|---|---|---|---|
| Income: Surveillance Report | $4,620.61 | $7,345.66 | 59% |
| Income: Contributions | $536.79 | $996.20 | 86% |
| Income: YouTube Ads | $226.92 | $210.40 | -7% |
| Income: Affiliate Links | $26.07 | $522.24 | 1903% |
| Total | $ 6,780.09 | $9,189.15 | 35% |
| Expenses: Operations & Infrastructure | $3,522.74 | $3,163.53 | -10% |
| Expenses: Production | $2,576.28 | $955.77 | -63% |
| Expenses: Content & Reviews | $906.16 | $162.27 | -82% |
| Expenses: Charity | $225.00 | $201.36 | -11% |
| Expenses: Paycheck | NA | $563.00 | NA |
| Total | $7,699.64 | $8,119.32 | 5% |
| Monero (income) | 2.77062513398 | 1.027880684 | -63% |
| Monero (expenses) | .063103943 | .288583534 | 357% |
| Bitcoin (income) | .00001 | .00348223 | 34,722% |
| Bitcoin (expenses) | 0 | 0 | 0% |
| BAT (income) | 236.075 | 22.13 | -91% |
| BAT (expenses) | 0 | 0 | NA |
There’s a few noteworthy changes from last year. First of all, gross income is up! I’m eagerly awaiting the day TNO officially makes more than $10,000. That’ll be a big milestone. Income is up 59% this year, and expenses are down 10% (more on that shortly).
Focusing on income, there’s a few noteworthy changes. First of all, income from Surveillance Report is up, not just overall but – unfortunately – also as an overall part of TNO’s income. Last year it was 70% of our income. This year, just shy of 80%. I personally dislike this. While I’m enjoying the work we do at SR and I have no plans to go anywhere or do anything else any time soon, I don’t like being so dependent on it. I wish TNO stood more on its own. This is also creating a bit of a feedback loop: SR makes the most money, so I prioritize SR (editing and such), which means it gets more content, which means it makes more money. I guess for now there’s not much I can do about that. Right now it’s not a big deal, I just wish things were a bit more diversified.
An interesting trend is how much more money I made from affiliate links this year. This was largely driven by Proton, who offers a cut of every renewal for plans purchased with an affiliate link and also has more opportunity to place affiliate links because of their vast suite, which also means that as time goes on and I keep doing this work, I'll likely continue to draw more from them. I’d like to remind readers that this has no bearing on the decisions I make to list services – NordVPN also offers a generous affiliate plan, and I’m certain that listing them wouldn’t look out of place to a typical reader unfamiliar with the privacy space. If anything it would make them more likely to buy since they appear on every other “Best VPN” list out there. Just noting things of interest. I also made a small return from Nitrokey. Thanks to those who used my link and supported us.
It’s also interesting to see that YouTube ad revenue declined slightly. I’m unsure if I put out less content than usual this year, though I do have some older videos that continue to rack up views at a steady pace. Regardless, I’m not particularly worried about that. While YouTube ad revenue is nice, it's just one bucket and I don't concern myself with it terribly.
Onto expenses. Last year, production costs were sky-high. As I said last year, I didn’t expect this to happen again this year. That aberration was the result of significant one-time expenses such as a quality camera, lighting, and some props to make for better quality videos. This year expenses in that category dropped 63%, as expected, and expenditures this year included things like, subscriptions, a small equipment rack I’m building out (to continue to improve production on my end), an SD card adapter to improve the file transfer process from the camera, and similar things.
A new category I feel the need to address is “paycheck.” As we all know, inflation’s been brutal (which is why it’s a bit surprising to see that income went up). As a result, there’s been a few times we’ve been just a little shy of putting food on the table here at the Bartram household. It still feels weird to pay myself from TNO funds, but presumably that’s the point: the point is to reimburse me for the effort I put into TNO. In some cases that means things like server costs and subscriptions, but in others that could mean things like my time. Regardless, $500 isn’t much, so I doubt there’d be any controversies about me using YouTube ad money to support my Lamborghini habit or anything.
Finally, a category I didn’t put on here for privacy reasons is taxes. Uncle Sam finally decided he wanted a cut of this, which is weird because I haven’t seen the IRS open any merge requests or issues, and I certainly don’t remember them editing any videos or running any server backups. It turns out, New Mexico LLCs are a bit weird in this respect. I’m not a tax expert, but according to the one I visited, it seems this all basically gets treated as my personal income even though I’ve got a separate bank account and clear delineations on what money goes where. It’s very strange. Regardless, after visiting with the taxman this year, it seems I owe quit a bit and I’ll probably be paying that off through 2025 and a little bit into 2026 – unless I get lucky and my 2026 returns help ease the burden (at this point I'm scared it'll simply add to it, but I'll have to figure that out when the time comes).
2025 Goals
I don’t have big plans for 2025, to be honest. At least not in the sense of “here’s major things on the horizon!” I do plan to continue to try to carve out time as best I can to get back on the content creation train. I want to keep posting videos and blogs with regularity, and I’m far from running out of video ideas.
Perhaps my only “major” goal is once again, on the backend. I still want to lower the “Operations & Infrastructure” cost category. It’s currently nearly 40% of our expenses, and that limits our ability to expand back into services like Matrix (which I still hope to do at some point). I’m hoping to move some of the less-bandwidth-intensive services (like Mastodon and probably the website itself) literally in-house. We can save hundreds of dollars per year on VPS by doing so – right now Mastodon alone is $260, Nextcloud is $230, and the website is $100. Moving in-house will allow me reduce annual overhead while also getting more storage in return. The only thing I really can’t move is PeerTube because of bandwidth limitations, but even that has a little bit of wiggle room. This category is complicated and made up of lots of recurring charges (like domain name hosting – letting one of those go soon, too – and subscriptions, but I think I can bring the cost down quite a lot by changing up how I host things. I’ll be starting this month with Nextcloud, so we’ll see how it goes!
Although I said I have no “big plans” for this year, rest assured that I also have no plans to slow down or stop. This year’s focus is going to be refining, streamlining, and refocusing. I’m going to be looking for ways to be more productive, reduce costs, improve efficiency, and create a sustainable workflow where I can keep putting out consistent content – while, most importantly, continuing to keep the website current, accurate, and helpful to those looking to regain their privacy.
Thank you to everyone who’s contributed thus far. I hope the project continues to bring to life the vision you’re supporting. This year will not be any easier for privacy than past years have been, but we plan to meet those challenges head on.
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