Reflections on Reaching 16 Million People Online in Four Years

Creating Finxter was a life-changing, almost spiritual experience for me. My main goal was always to help improve collective intelligence.

Pursuing that goal, we educated more than 16 million people online. And that’s counting only those on the blog itself.

Let’s reflect on some key observations

On average, a Finxter visitor spent 42 seconds (of all numbers) investing their most precious resource: time & attention.

That’s millions of human attention minutes.

❓ Q: But how much is human attention worth?

Well – the baseline calculation would be:

  • 16 million people * 42s engagement time
  • = 11 million minutes
  • = 186k hours

Finxter is an educational/technical site so the baseline assumption is that for every minute invested reading, the reader gets at least one minute (probably ten times that) back in terms of improved efficiency or proficiency back.

Why this assumption? Because people wouldn’t read an educational blog in the first place if they wouldn’t get a return on their time investment, on average.

The value of that attention can be quantified as follows:

  • 1 minute spent on-site.
  • >1 minute gained off-site.

I’m confident that this is a very conservative assumption – thousands of people have contacted me over the years telling me that Finxter saved them hours, weeks, months of unnecessary work, effort, and time wasted.

So you may wonder:

❓ Q: How much monetary value did Finxter create?

With this in mind, let’s ask ChatGPT what the average hourly rate of a Finxter reader is.

Consider that Finxter readers are intelligent, capable of speaking the English language, tech proficient:

Round this down to $40 per hour:

  • $40 per hour * 186k hours value creation = 7,440,000.

πŸ‘‰ Finxter content created more than $7M in value by educating millions of readers in four years.

Granted, this number is based on napkin math – and it’s all I have.

Let’s ask ChatGPT for a generalized plot visualizing the relationship between value generation and ROI multiple, i.e., how much time do readers save after reading one minute Finxter blog content, on average.

πŸ’‘ Example: if you spend one minute reading a blog article about fixing an OpenAI API error and it saves you 10 minutes debugging, the ROI multiple would be 10x.

This figure demonstrates that a $7M value creation of the Finxter blog is more on the conservative end — especially considering that Finxters made a lot of money following our early calls on successful stocks such as TSLA and NVDA:

Both investments more than doubled since (no investment advice, we’re just some nerds fascinated by technological disruption).

❓ Q: What is the revenue potential of creating a website?

I know it’s hard to find valuable data and insights from successful online creators. Most don’t tell you how much money can be made.

A good starting point for blogging is this formula calculating revenue per thousand visits (RPM):

What’s a realistic RPM? It depends on website monetization. For websites that only run ads to an American audience, a solid RPM figure could be $40.

  • If you have additional income streams such as books, courses, or affiliate programs, double or even triple that.
  • If you have a non-US audience, RPM could be half or even less.

For example, if you get 1M pageviews and run ads to an American audience, you could earn 1M * $40 / 1000 = $40k.

If you reach 1M users per month and each user gives you 3 pageviews, your monthly income would be $120k assuming a $40 RPM figure.

So thanks to the Internet, it’s possible to make $120k per month blogging. Although it’s not easy and their must be a clear value proposition for millions of people.

The Internet is great for sniffing out value and it it’s ruthless in ignoring content with zero relative value.

❓ Q: Is blogging still worth pursuing post ChatGPT?

I’m not so sure.

I’d say the best opportunity is to use generative AI heavily to scale our value proposition beyond our own time limitations. There are only 24 hours in the day after all!

To learn how, read more on the Finxter blog:

πŸ‘‰ How to Make Money with AI Writers (Koala Review)

In any case, allow me to thank you from the bottom of my heart for being part of the incredible Finxter journey. If you want to stay on the right side of change, follow my occasional newsletter where I share the best insights I have:

πŸ‘‰ Free AI Course and Newsletter: Be On The Right Side Of Change

The future is bright! 😎