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Home / Blog / Resources / Income Reports

Income Report: Q3 2018

Published on October 21, 2018 by Brock McGoff · Income Reports May contain affiliate links (what's this?)

It’s been a whole year since the last TMM income report. Let’s see what happened since Q3 2017…


Income report Q3 2018

I know, I know…it’s been a while. I haven’t published a quarterly income report since Q3 2017 (about a year ago).

What happened? A couple of things:

  1. These reports take a long time to produce, which meant…
  2. I was spending less time writing about style (which also takes a lot of time and energy).
  3. The income reports sometimes felt a little “off brand” or random.
  4. Lastly, as the business started to grow, I sometimes felt a little weird about sharing exact revenue numbers.

For all of those reasons, I simply chose to stop doing income reports after Q3 2017. I didn’t even do an annual review for 2017 (like I did for 2016 and 2015).

So why start back up? Believe it or not, these “behind the curtain” posts were pretty popular, despite the fact that they have nothing to do with men’s style.

I get a lot of questions about blogging, being an influencer (I hate that word) and making money online. I’ve even had a few people reach out and ask when the next income report would be published!

Plus, I kind of miss writing these. I track my revenue and expenses each month in an extremely satisfying, color coded spreadsheet.

But putting a public-facing income report together really forces me to comb through the numbers and think about the past three months.

Producing these reports is a good exercise for me, and since they’re well-received, I’ve decided to bring them back.

Rather than going back to fill in the gaps, I’ll just pick things back up at Q3 2018. Let’s get into it!

TMM Revenue (Quarterly)

Let’s start with the big picture:

TMM Quarterly Revenue 2016 to 2018
TMM Quarterly Revenue by Category

You might notice that after a sharp peak in Q3 2017, this chart starts going in the wrong direction.

Allow me to explain…

Q3 2017 was the peak of my willingness to publish sponsored content. I did about one sponsorships each month.

Paid partnerships are an extremely lucrative way to monetize any sort of audience platform – blog, YouTube, Instagram, Google+ (heh, jk). But I’ve never loved taking on sponsors.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m flattered that brands want to work with me. You should be too, because that means they value you as a potential customer. I’ve worked with some awesome brands, and I think sponsored content can be great if it’s done the right way.

But it’s hard to be 100% unbiased and objective when money changes hands, and anyone who says otherwise is lying to you (or worse, to themselves).

In my opinion, too much sponsored content waters down your voice. It makes it hard for your followers to know what you really think, which products you really recommend buying.

I mean, how many times have you read a glowing review for a product, only to realize that the whole article was sponsored by the company who made the product?

For lots of reasons, I decided to scale way back on sponsorships. In fact, there have been a few months this year when I didn’t do any sponsorships at all.

Yeah, it’s leaving a substantial amount of money on the table. But it feels great!

Show Me the Money

Now that we’ve got all that cleared up, let’s talk numbers. Revenue from TMM falls into three categories:

  1. Advertising (includes sponsorships)
  2. Affiliate commissions
  3. Selling products

Let’s look at each category for Q3 2018 (note: some of the links below are affiliate links).

TMM Revenue Breakdown

Advertising – $16,927 (down 30% from same period last year)

During the same time period last year (Jul, Aug, Sep), I did 3x as many paid partnerships (compared to Q3 this year), hence the 30% drop year over year (YoY).

Honestly, I’m okay with this.

The rest of the advertising revenue comes from display ads you see on this site, plus YouTube ad revenue (Google AdSense).

Affiliate – $7,314 (down 27% from same period last year)

I think this YoY drop is due to two things:

  1. Q3 2017 was an unusually strong quarter for affiliate revenue
  2. Amazon lowered their commission rates last year, which has caused a steady decline in revenue from that program

Affiliate programs have always been a small part of my business, but I know other content creators who do really well with them.

It’s definitely something I want to focus more on going forward, especially since affiliate income is truly passive.

Products – $1,643 (up 49% from same period last year)

The Modest Man Style Guide
The Modest Man Style Guide

This category includes digital products (The Modest Man Style Guide) and physically products (the occasional sale on Grailed, etc.).

In July, I paired down my watch collection by selling a bunch of them off via Instagram. This is more for fun than for money. It’s nice giving someone a good deal and seeing a watch or article of clothing go to a good home.

The Style Guide is good for about $200/month on average. It’s a solid guide, but I haven’t updated it in a while, and I do almost nothing to promote it.

But again, that’s 100% passive income…the best kind!

Grand Total = $25,885 (down 27% from same period last year)

Passive = $21,095 (up 3% from same period last year)

I decided to start tracking how much of the revenue from TMM is passive (i.e., doesn’t require routine, direct input from me).

Sponsorships are not passive. Display ads are passive. Affiliate programs are passive.

I like passive income. To me, it’s way more valuable than any other kind of income.

Going forward, especially considering my partnerships with PMNYC, my goal for TMM is to grow the passive side of the business.

Sure, I’ll still do some sponsorships, but I’m being super picky about them. Any company I work with has to: a) be an excellent fit, and b) have the right budget. If this means one per month, one per quarter or less, that’s fine.

What About Expenses?

I’m not going to list out every single one-time expense anymore because, frankly, it’s very tedious. Of course, I do track these in my accounting software (Wave).

But here are the monthly recurring expenses, totaled for the quarter:

  • Rent (Studio) – $2,025
  • Virtual assistant – $900
  • WP Engine – $747
  • Phone – $330
  • ConvertKit – $202
  • LeadPages – $201
  • Internet – $120
  • Adobe CC – $63
  • SmarterQueue – $60
  • Bluehost – $60
  • Canva – $39

Total Recurring Expenses = $4,747 (roughly the same each quarter)

That leaves us with a Q3 2018 profit of $21,138 (or about $7k per month).

Again, this doesn’t include income from Peter Manning NYC, which I’m keeping separate from TMM.

Last year, I was all about increasing the bottom line, hence the record sponsorships revenue in Q3.

This year, I’m thinking long-term:

What kind of business do I want to have? How do I want to spend my time?

What sort of content do I want to be known for? What am I willing to do for more money? What won’t I do?

At the end of the day, I have plenty of money to live comfortably and invest in growing The Modest Man. I’m very happy with my current situation.

I hope this report is informative and maybe even a little inspiring. If you have questions about any of this stuff, feel free to ask me down in the comments.

Thanks for reading!

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Income Reports blogging, online business, passive income

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About Brock McGoff

The Modest Man founder, Brock is an aspiring minimalist who enjoys working out, spending time with his family, discovering new brands and creating great content.

Background: Brock McGoff has a bachelor's degree in psychology and a professional background in digital marketing. He believes that men's fashion is just one facet of self-improvement, and he started The Modest Man to help regular guys feel more confident by improving their appearance.

An east coast native, Brock currently lives in Arizona with his wife and daughter. When he's not working, he spends time with family, training BJJ, reading/listening to books and podcasts, and unsuccessfully trying to decide which movie to stream.

Expertise: Brock has built a men's lifestyle YouTube channel with over 400k subscribers. He's also worked as the creative marketing manager in a men's apparel startup. Brock has been quoted in, mentioned by or featured in publications like Esquire, Huff Post, Men's Health, WWD and Forbes.

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    Got questions? Want to share your opinion? Comment below!

  1. atoine says

    December 27, 2018 at 12:35 am

    Glad you’re back at it! I love reading these reports and your thoughts, for some reasons. Thanks for sharing this. There are many similar posts all over the internet, yours is the only one that feel honest.

    I’ve been reading your reports and lurking on your Reddit threads for a while; it was super inspiring to watch you grow your online business. In fact you inspired me to do the same; I couldn’t stand my engineer job anymore so I started my website as a side-project. Fast forward 2 years later, the website is making more income than my office job. It’s weird; I should probably consider that I “made it”, yet all I can think about is “how can I grow the incomes even more”? My revenues are about 95% amazon affiliates, so I don’t really consider my website as a “business”; more like an opportunity as it’s very volatile (I don’t have enough income sources). But like you mention, there’s something very attractive about passive income… First it’s, well, passive. Second I don’t own anyone anything (since I’m not working with sponsors, I don’t need to publish frequently and I’m 100% unbiased which feels GREAT).

    Anyway, thanks again for the inspiration! I owe you a few drinks 🙂

    Cheers and good luck for the future!

    Reply
  2. Chris F says

    November 25, 2018 at 10:32 am

    Love these posts that you do! Very inspirational, and I enjoy the perspective on sponsored ads. You are sacrificing a little extra income for more authentic and non-bias reviews/articles. This is completely respectable and adds further to the quality of your blog Keep up the good work!

    Reply
  3. Jingles says

    October 28, 2018 at 11:15 pm

    Is Peter Manning going to get more t-shirts in different sizes? Seems like they and Jax Everett don’t carry many different sizes or selection for that manner.

    Reply
    • Brock says

      October 28, 2018 at 11:16 pm

      You mean restock, or creating different sizes other than the ones they have now? What other styles would you want to see?

      Reply

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