Thanks for another good year at USWildflowers.com.

Fire Pink – Silene virginica

Statistically, USWildflowers.com grew from 477 species at the end of 2013 to 512 at the end of 2014, achieving the 5-year goal of 500 species.  There are over 1680 photographs of those 512 species. Each species on this site represents several hours (in some cases MANY hours) of work photographing, researching, writing descriptions, and publishing the photographs and updates to the database.

USWildflowers.com continued its visitor growth in 2014, although not as dramatically as previously. Page views were up nearly 13% over 2013 to a milestone of exceeding 1.5 million views.  Revenue was about 40% lower than 2013.

Based on prior trends, I had predicted a 20% to 25% increase in “traffic” for 2014. The number of visits made it to that, with a 26% increase over 2013, even though page views did not make that level. I suspect the slower increase in page views was due to the transition from desktop computers to mobile devices. Rummaging through a website, especially one like USWildflowers.com that is not particularly optimized for mobile device, is probably not as likely to occur on a phone or tablet as it is when you have a large screen and pointing device like that on a desktop computer. Bandwidth cost is also usually higher on mobile devices than from your home, so digging deeper into a site is probably less attractive via mobile.

The financial decline mentioned above might be attributable at least partially to mobile devices as well, since the location of ads may usually be outside the smaller initial viewing area of a mobile device.  However, I also noticed that the decline in revenue started in the latter part of 2013 soon after the Internet Explorer release of Adblock Plus. While this product claims to block only “annoying” ads, what is “annoying” is a matter of opinion, and I think they go too far.  The default configuration puts small websites such as USWildflowers.com at risk. If you use Adblock Plus or another ad-suppressing product, please consider putting USWildflowers.com in your exception list, and perhaps even to petition the product developer to including it in a default exception list. (I really try to avoid “obnoxious” ad content and placement.)

While the current level of revenue continues to be adequate to cover “web hosting costs” as well as to provide for some gas money to help offset costs of regional trips (and without USWildflowers.com revenue I would have been hard-pressed to pull together the finances to repair my camera when the shutter broke), the current level of revenue will not cover traveling further afield to more “exotic” wildflower sites, and certainly leaves any code updates to modernize (and mobilize) the site purely in my lap – without a financial motivation to do so.

I don’t wish to seem ungrateful – you folks who visit this website have been a great encouragement to me. I still find it amazing that this website gets over 3,100 visits a day on an average during the peak season. Wildflower photography, research, and publishing this website has been a tremendous activity for the past 5+ years, and I expect to continue to pursue that going forward. I simply think that early 2015 will be a time when I determine if I need to take a slightly different direction with my spare time.

In the meantime, I hope that you and yours will have a happy and rewarding 2015. Thanks for your ongoing use of USWildflowers.com as a resource in your effort to enjoy and identify wildflowers of the United States.

Proverbs 16:9 (NKJV) – “A man’s heart plans his way, But the Lord directs his steps.”