First of all, I encourage everyone to use an adblocker of some kind or another when surfing the web, even on my website! I will never "content block" you for using an adblocker. So, go find an ad blocker that works for you and come back here to finish reading WHY I decided to remove my store and put ads back on the website after almost 10 years.

What was wrong with the store?

The store was built with WordPress and WooCommerce and was technically a different website from KTracy.com. It was always my intention to integrate the KTracy.com Store with KTracy.com from a design aspect. However, after I sold the KTracy Manor and moved into KTracy Tower, I've lacked the appropriate space to create and keep the products for the store. As a result, the store's sales began to dip and I was informed during one of my most recent Twitch Live Streams that the PayPal checkout wasn't even working; which probably explains the lack of sales over the last few months.

I do plan to re-launch an online store once Katie and I find a new home outside of KTracy Tower, as having ample creative space is a top priority for me in our house hunt. For now, the store was just becoming a distraction that posed an unwarranted security risk because of the complicated nature of WordPress.

In the future, I plan to use an e-commerce hosting solution as consumers seem to have more trust for established e-commerce juggernauts, there are more options for selling on Amazon and similar platforms, and letting it be hosted elsewhere is just less of a headache for me than dealing with WordPress and WooCommerce.

What about all the links to the store throughout the website?

Find and Replace

Once I get the new store online, I'll go back and update any old links to the store. For now, I'm just going to let the links be broken. It's not ideal from an SEO or quality perspective, but it should only be for a matter of a few months until things are fully operational again and it saves me from having to do the same work twice.

But why the ads?

When I started KTracy.com back in 2004, I migrated it from a free site I was hosting on Angelfire. My goal with this website has always been "don't lose money."

We've had quite a few profitable years when I was been selling through CafePress, when I launched The MSPaint Comic in 2014 and 2015, and more recently with the addition of decals and Printful merch in the store. In the periods in between, I've used ads to generate just enough revenue to keep things afloat without wrecking my personal finances.

Truthfully, I'm at a point in my life now where I could just take the loss and pay for it as I would any other hobby. However, generating a little bit of revenue every day is kind of fun and makes the web master experience more enjoyable.

So ads will pay for KTracy.com?

Well, in the short term, yes. I left Google Ads with a some money in my account that I never had deposited. That will pay for the rest of the year.

Unfortunately, due to a variety of factors, ad revenue has plummeted for creators on every platform. So, between traffic in 2023 being less than it was in 2011 and the lower CPM and CPC payouts, KTracy.com is on track to actually lose money starting in 2024.

Again, I'm not losing so much money that I'm going to have to shut KTracy.com down. My personal finances will cover any losses I incur with this assuming we don't get a new home that I can properly run my business from before the ink starts running red.

So KTracy.com is Safe?

More now than ever.

When I got rid of the store, I actually cleaned about 10 years of crap from the FTP, including experiments with various CMS platforms, including WordPress, Drupal, Concrete, Known, and Grav. Right now, the FTP is currently only hosting the files for KTracy.com; which makes KTracy.com super cheap and super safe.