My Site
I had 120k views on my site with the most popular post being a look at Scott Scheper’s Antinet Zettelkasten book, which I don’t think is worth your time. My second most popular post was How to Handle PDFs natively in Obsidian. Both of those posts were from 2023 and when I look at my top 10 posts, none of them came from 2024. None of the top 50 posts from 2024 were written in 2024 in fact, so I guess my current writing is not what people want to read.
Financially my site made about $2000 USD last year compared to $3600 USD in 2023. Since this site isn’t my main income I’m not that concerned about the decrease in revenue, though I’d prefer to see that number go up so it could help cover any unexpected gaps in employment that
may come my way.
Skillshare
I have my courses on Skillshare and my most popular one there is Getting Started with Obsidian followed by Getting Started with Zettelkasten. Up to November 2024 I earned $2349 USD and December looks to be on track to make that about $2600 USD.
I produced no new courses and with my lack of YouTube videos in 2024 I didn’t have much opportunity to advertise the courses either. If I only looked at the course income from my personal site, the courses aren’t worth it at all but in total over the years I’ve earned $20k on Skillshare so if other courses come out I’ll put them on Skillshare as well.
YouTube
My YouTube channel had 239k views this year which is down 26% compared to the previous year. This doesn’t surprise me as I spent months not producing any videos at all. With no new content to feed the YouTube gods less people would see my content.
My top video for 2024 was How I use Obsidian to Track Programming followed by Sync Obsidian with Github for those looking for a free sync option. The most impactful to me has been my look at A Brief History of Misogyny by Jack Holland. I get an email or comment a week from a woman thanking my for talking about it. In some they’ve been having a hard time with men and are overjoyed to see a man talking about the problem.
On the revenue front my decreased YouTube output matched up with a general trend of less income. I earned about $600 from YouTube views in 2024 and I can remember when I was earning that per month in the 2020 – 2021 timeframe. If I didn’t have Skillshare and my own site with courses relying on YouTube for income would obviously be a terrible idea.
Cycling
For 2024 I again aimed to ride 10,000km and hit that a few months ago. I was just short of 11,000 km ridden and 114k meters of elevation gain. I’ll keep the same goals for 2025 as they’re good numbers to make sure I’m getting in the distance for my training.
Books
I read 46 books in 2024, which is higher than 2023 (31) but lower that the last 10 years which average around 80 books a year. During my highest cycling months in the summer I was lamenting my lack of reading, but then realized that I was dedicating my time to cycling and being outside so something had to go. I can’t push off my family or my job so reading is what had to go.
This realization put me at ease after beating myself up for a few months about my lack of reading.
Career
I’m still working at ProudCity running a small web host for US Cities. We got a bunch of big stuff done with our Kubernetes clusters to increase our stability. Like many businesses, I’ve got a bunch of technical debt to work through in 2025, but we’re making good progress most weeks to get back on top of everything.
I like the company and my boss. The work is stimulating and I get to set the technical direction for everything so I’m happy. We just renegotiated my contract after 3 years and I’m happy with the changes and pay.