You know, I don’t really have anything new to say on the ten year anniversary of this website.

Each year it arrives, it passes, and I think a little bit about how far we’ve come. I think about the internet and how it’s changing, not always for the better, but how our little place seems to be doing just fine. All-in-all it’s what I want it to be.

And for that I’m happy.

Thank you to everyone that visits everyday and supports us to keep us online.

Over the past few weeks I’ve made some behind-the-scenes changes to how advertising works on the site, and I wanted to share a quick update in one place.

Short version:

• We officially moved to a new ad platform.
• It’s already performing several times better than the old setup.
• I’ve also updated the Advertise page so anyone can now easily purchase direct ad placements on the site again.

If you’d like the longer, more detailed background on why I made this change and how it affects the site long-term, I’ve linked a few in-depth posts below.

I try and do an update once a year where I kind of check-in on the current state of the website. Last year told a similar story to the year before, costs had increased, ad revenue had decreased, and supporter revenue was solid and growing.

The past year is not that much different. Ad revenue is what it is and the new normal. It’s at least steady now. And membership revenue is the reason we are able to keep publishing. In almost every week supporting revenue is 2x-3x ad revenue.

The website’s costs have remained flat this year. I was able to put off upgrading any of the servers last year, but the forum server’s hard drive space is creeping upward (we’re now around 65% full, mostly from image attachments). In the next year I’ll probably need to offload some of these images to a secondary storage solution. Which will probably have an additional monthly cost.

Below are the last 52 weeks of revenue for the website—ad revenue in blue, supporter revenue in green. The big green spikes you see are the main recurring annual renewals each year. One is right around when I write this post each year, another is around the time when the website first launched, and the others are around the end of the year and previous site update posts.

It was nine years ago that I unveiled Chorus.fm. Nine years.

Sometimes it’s hard to wrap my head around the passing of time and other times it feels like it is going by so fast I blink and another three years fly by. I just wanted to take a brief moment to pause, reflect, and say thank you to everyone who continues to read this website, support this website, and participate in our community.

Here’s to many more.

When I debuted the “share music page” in 2019, it was really just something I wanted for myself. I wanted a better way to be able to share music in my newsletter so that people could easily find the albums on their preferred streaming platform. But over the past few years I’ve heard from so many people that have used the page to share music with their friends and family as well. I see thousands of songs and albums in the database. To see a small personal project grow to be used by others is the biggest compliment.

As I wrote about last week, I’ve been working on improving my personal blog as a way to keep myself busy and away from doomscrolling. It’s been a fun nightly project to add some new features and start posting more photo and micro blogs when inspiration strikes. The first time I posted an update about something I was listening to I just knew I needed to find a way to combine my sharing project and my blog.

So I did.

Last year, I wrote about the annual state of Chorus in August. The state of the website was, more or less, that costs had increased, ad revenue had decreased, and supporter revenue had more or less stayed the same.

This year, I’m only a couple of months behind my already haphazard schedule of checking in on everything. Packing up a home and moving will toss everything into disarray like that.

The story of the past year is similar, with a few new bright spots.

The website’s costs have remained flat. I forecast that within the next twelve months, I’ll need to upgrade the forum server’s hard drive space again (we’re a little over half full, mostly from image attachments).

Ad revenue continues to be predictable and predictably less than the year before.

Supporter revenue continues to be strong and growing, which is why I can run this website and community.

If there’s one thing we like to do around here, it’s rank things.

From our End of the Year lists to the countless albums/sports/food rankings in the forums, it’s just a tradition at this point. When the conversation dies down, break out a ranking.

The other night, I was lying in bed thinking about the “bias sorter” going around Tumblr in 2018. It originated, I believe, as a way for people to rank their favorite K-pop bands. I’d been using it for the past few years to start my end of the year album rankings. It’s an excellent way to review a list and decide what you like more: A or B. But the problem is that it’s a pain to use. You need to enter each item individually, click enter after each one, and then go through the ranking process. And after you’re done, there’s no good way to do it again without manually re-entering all those items. I started wondering if I could put something together that would let me input any size list of things I wanted, and then it could present them to me one at a time to pick from and give me a final ranking.

I have a reoccurring reminder to reflect on the state of Chorus at least once a year. The idea is to pull all the numbers together, get an idea of how things are going, and make plans for the future of the website. I realized today that I hadn’t done this since 2021.

So, it was a morning of looking at spreadsheets. And I see a few obvious trends. The first is that the cost of running the website has increased. The most significant cost increase comes from our hosting provider unilaterally hiking prices 20% in April after being bought by another company. Cool. Second, the online advertising industry (already tenuous at best) has yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels. I charted the last two years, and we’re continuing to trend downward.