Network Update: The Real Numbers, Fall 2026

This site is supposed to be a network built in public, so here is the part most operators skip: the actual numbers. As of the start of November 2026, six live sites earn a combined ~$237 a month. Not a typo, not a teaser for a course. One site carries almost all of it, one trickles, one is just starting to show up in search, and the rest earn nothing yet. Between them, though, these sites run close to 190 calculators, a catalog of ~2,250 virtual backgrounds, and a few thousand indexed pages — so money is only one of the numbers worth reporting. Here is where each one really stands, and what the data is telling me to do next.

RemodelCalculators — the one that pays the bills

RemodelCalculators is the earner — 146 free calculators backed by 376 original diagrams — and this fall it quietly got better at turning that into money. For a few months it ran on Journey by Mediavine:

• August 2026 — $88.85
• September 2026 — $197.30 (best month on Journey)
• October 2026 — ~$195 combined, during a mid-month ad-network switch

In mid-October I moved the site from Journey to Google AdSense. That one decision is the most interesting line in the whole report. In just the back half of the month — 16 days — AdSense alone brought in $135.59 on 14,619 pageviews, at a $9.27 page RPM. Journey, at the same traffic, had been running an implied RPM closer to $7. Same visitors, same pages, better monetization — about a 30% lift per pageview.

At that pace the site is tracking to roughly $255 a month if traffic holds, and construction search is seasonal, so I expect it to soften through winter and climb again in spring. The takeaway I am carrying forward: at a few hundred pageviews a day, don't assume the managed ad network beats AdSense. Measure the RPM, then decide.

MeetBackdrops — small, passive, and honestly flat

MeetBackdrops is a real catalog — roughly 2,250 HD virtual backgrounds across 23 categories — but the Stripe record is unglamorous: 30 orders in its lifetime. The last three months look like this:

• August — 7 orders, $68.93
• September — 6 orders, $42.94
• October — 7 orders, $41.93

Average order is about $7.69, roughly two sales a week, and it has been dead flat September into October. I am not going to dress that up. The catalog gets traffic; the HD purchases convert at a trickle. The useful lesson here is a negative one — a low-priced digital download, with no real urgency and a free-enough substitute a search away, is a hard sell on volume alone. The question I am sitting with is whether the real money in this one was ever the $5 download, or whether it lives in branded and licensed sets instead.

FigureMoney — the one to actually watch

FigureMoney made $0 this period — which is striking, because it is the biggest site in the network by surface area: 42 calculators plus a paycheck breakdown for all 50 states and D.C., 528 pages in Google's index. It is also the most encouraging site to watch, which is the kind of sentence that only makes sense if you have launched a site from zero before.

Over the last 28 days it logged 11 clicks on 17,746 impressions in Google Search Console. Eleven clicks is nothing. Seventeen thousand impressions is the whole story. A month ago the site was showing up for about 160 searches a day; by the end of October that was 1,000 to 1,500 a day — roughly a 9× jump in a single month. Average position improved from the low 60s toward the mid 40s over the same stretch.

That is exactly the shape I described in how long it takes to rank a new site: impressions arrive first, positions grind up next, and clicks come last once pages cross onto page one or two. Most of FigureMoney's pages still sit on page four through ten, so the clicks haven't landed yet — but the few that did came in on the right pages: the tax-refund calculator, debt consolidation, self-employment tax, and the programmatic salary pages. The pattern is working; it just needs position, and position needs time.

RightDumpster — zero, and I know why

RightDumpster has made $0. It is genuinely useful — a weight-aware sizing calculator wrapped in 57 city pages (184 URLs) that answers a question people get wrong and pay for — but it is built as lead-gen, and I have not solved the monetization. The intent is there; the path from a correct answer to a dollar is not. That is an open problem I would rather name than paper over, and it is next in line for real work.

The two quiet ones

The network has two product sites — WolfResume and PromptDynamo — that are quiet right now. WolfResume saw a burst of early sales that has since gone flat; traffic and conversions over the last 30 days have been a dud. Rather than pad this report with a chart of nothing, I will give each its own update when there is something real to say.

What the numbers are telling me to do

Put the whole portfolio on one page and the strategy picks itself:

• Feed the winner. RemodelCalculators earns; more calculators, more diagrams, and defending its rankings is the highest-confidence use of my time.
• Be patient with FigureMoney. The impression ramp says the hard part — getting indexed and shown — is done. The job now is position, which means links and letting it age, not more pages.
• Fix the monetization gaps, not the traffic. RightDumpster and MeetBackdrops don't have a traffic problem; they have a "how does this actually make money" problem. That is a different, and more interesting, thing to solve.
• Stop romanticizing the quiet sites. A product with early sales and then a flat month is telling you something. Listen to it before pouring in more work.

Six sites, ~$237 a month, one carrying the rest. That is the honest state of the network in November 2026 — and the reason I publish the numbers at all is that the trajectory is more interesting than the total. I will post the next update when there is a real change to report. More teardowns and build logs are in the build logs.