Goodsol Solitaire Blog

Another One Person MicroISV

Following up on my One Person MicroISV post of last week:

Coding Horror in How to Get Rich Programming profiles Paul Preese, author of Desktop Tower Defense, an online game.  Apparently this game is making $8000 per month in Google AdSense revenue.

Once again, this shows that if you can create something that can get a lot of people to a web site, you can make good money with AdSense.  You don't even have to get huge amounts of traffic or expend much effort to get a smaller, decent amount of money from it.  My online games site doesn't get huge amounts of traffic and didn't require a huge amount of effort to create, and yet it too brings in a four figure monthly income, mostly from AdSense. 

As Iggy points out in a recent post, the big problem with a business that depends on Google AdSense is that this source of income could dry up at any time.  While Iggy makes some good points about Google, I think the real risk with these businesses is advertising in general, not Google.  Google is not going to go out of business.  But Google's AdSense revenue is highly dependent on the advertising market in general, and that can and will go through severe slumps.  We saw it after the dot com bust in 2001.  The bottom can fall out of the advertising market and the sites that get all of their money from advertising would be in trouble.

Multiple sources of income is always the key.  If my AdSense revenue were to disappear, that would be too bad but wouldn't affect much since I have other sources of income.  The businesses that make all their revenue from advertising, especially only from AdSense, may find that it goes away as quickly as it came.

But as long as you recognize that risk, it is clear that a lot of money can be made off AdSense.

Action Solitaire v1.2

We have just released a new version of Action Solitaire.

Version 1.2 adds 8 new games bringing the total number of games to 60.

The new version of Action Solitaire can be downloaded here.

Large Suit Card Set

We've released a new card set.

The Large Suit Card Set features large suits and numbers for easy visibility.

The Large Suit card set can be downloaded here.  The card set works in our games Pretty Good Solitaire, Action Solitaire, FreeCell Wizard, Spider Wizard, Solitaire Wizard, and Most Popular Solitaire.

One Person Micro-ISVs

In the Wall Street Journal online, there's a profile of a one person Micro-ISV (that's jargon for a one person company) that makes 5 to 10 million a year.

PlentyOfFish Owner Has the Perfect Bait For a Huge Success

Lots of people run Web sites by themselves. But it's likely that no other solo venture runs at the scale of PlentyOfFish. For the week ended April 28, it was the 96th-busiest Web site in the U.S., according to the HitWise tracking service. That means it has more traffic than some of the Net's best-known destinations, such as Apple.com.

How does he make money?  Primarily Google ads.

Solitaire Wizard

We have just released a new version of Solitaire Wizard.

This is the first new version of Solitaire Wizard since 2001.  This version updates the product to bring in all the feature changes we have made in our other products since then, including support for downloadable card sets.  It also updates it to work better in Windows Vista.

Solitaire Wizard is a collection of 16 solitaire games, all games similar to the classic game Klondike (which is the actual name of the solitaire game that comes with Windows that Microsoft just called "Solitaire").  It is a companion product to Spider Wizard and FreeCell Wizard.  Updates of both of those games are in the works, but Solitaire Wizard was released first since it had been so long since I'd last updated it.