Project 24 April 2019 Update: Real Traffic Numbers, Honest Earnings, and What Actually Worked

You have been writing blog posts for months. You check your analytics every morning, compare this week to last week, and wonder if the curve will ever go up. That is exactly where Alston was in April 2019, two sites into Income School’s Project 24, with real numbers and zero spin. This update covers both sites, side by side, with actual page views, real traffic sources broken down by channel, and the honest income for the full month.

The honest answer is that April was a mixed bag. Traffic was down slightly on both sites compared to March. Income was $0.90 from Adsense. No affiliate sales closed on Site 2. And yet there were a few signals worth paying attention to, including one organic search trend at the tail end of April that pointed in the right direction for what would come next.

What You’ll Walk Out With

Site 1’s exact April 2019 stats: 576 page views, traffic sources by channel, bounce rate, and what the organic numbers actually mean for a 93-post site
Why traffic dipped on both sites in April and what a Google Trends check revealed about the real cause
A full breakdown of every traffic source for Site 1: Facebook, Quora, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, YouTube, and organic Google
Site 2’s April numbers: 97 page views, 84 total users, a 19-second average on page, and no sales
The real income for April: $0.90 Adsense, a $10.26 lifetime total, and why that number is still within the expected Project 24 window
Why adding an info product to a blog changes your revenue math from a small commission to 100% of the sale price
The honest drawbacks of running two niche sites at the same time, including what it costs in output speed and focus
How to find out which skill, niche, or topic you already have that could become your first profitable site, using finder.platformproof.com

What Project 24 Actually Is

Project 24 is a course and community run by Income School, founded by Jim and Ricky. The concept is straightforward: follow their content site system for 24 months and you can build a niche site that earns $1,500 or more per month from ads, affiliate commissions, and your own products. You pick a topic, write posts that answer specific questions people search for, and let organic traffic build over time.

The 24-month frame is not a marketing hook. Jim and Ricky are direct about the fact that most sites see almost no traffic in the first six to nine months. Search engines take time to trust a new domain. Content has to accumulate before it compounds. The growth pattern they describe looks more like a slow flatline followed by a sharp climb, not a steady slope from day one.

At the point of this April 2019 update, Alston was running two sites inside the Project 24 system simultaneously. Site 1 was the more developed property, with 93 blog posts and 18 YouTube videos connected to it. Site 2 was newer and smaller, sitting at 40 blog posts, with the last 10 of those published during April itself.

Neither site had reached the hockey stick moment yet. But the data for April gives a clear look at what early-stage Project 24 sites actually look like from the inside, without any of the highlight-reel framing that shows up in a lot of blogging content online.

Site 1 in April 2019: The Raw Numbers

Site 1 had 93 blog posts and 18 YouTube videos connected to it by the end of April. That is a meaningful content base. For the full month of April 2019, the stats were: 576 page views, 508 unique views, an average time on page of 1 minute and 49 seconds, a bounce rate of nearly 86%, and an exit percentage of 68%.

Compared to March 2019, that is a slight dip. Looking at March and April together as a two-month window, the combined totals were 1,218 page views, 1,072 unique views, an average time on page of 1 minute and 41 seconds, a bounce rate of 84.8%, and an exit percentage of 69%.

The math tells you that March had roughly 642 page views. April’s 576 is a drop of about 10%. That is not a cliff or a crash. But it is also not growth, and any new site builder looking at that chart for the first time would feel the pull of anxiety that comes with a flatline.

Alston investigated the reason. He used Google Trends to compare the current month against the same period in the prior year and found that his niche was slightly down seasonally. That context changes the interpretation entirely. A niche-wide dip is very different from your site losing traction. If the whole market is lower in a given month, your traffic sitting lower is not a sign of a problem with your site. It is a sign of the season.

This is exactly the kind of check that separates bloggers who quit in month four from those who make it to month 12. The default response to a traffic dip is to assume something broke. The smarter response is to check whether the dip is yours or the market’s before making any changes.

Breaking Down the Traffic Sources for Site 1

For April 2019, Site 1’s traffic broke into four categories: social at 141 users, direct at 124 users, organic search at 75 users, and referral at 7.

Looking at the individual sources behind those categories, Facebook led with 63 users. Quora came in second with 60. Bing added 30. Yahoo contributed 22. DuckDuckGo sent 19. YouTube sent 15. And Google via a secure referral channel added 2 more.

The Facebook number needs context. Alston was using a blog-to-social app that automatically pushes each published article to his social media channels as soon as it goes live. That removes a manual step, which is a real efficiency gain, but it also means the Facebook audience is not specifically seeking out the content. They are scrolling through a feed and clicking through if the headline catches them. That kind of traffic tends to bounce faster and stay for less time, which pulls down average session quality.

The Quora traffic is a different signal. Someone who finds your answer on Quora and clicks through to your site is already engaged with the topic. They came looking for help with a specific question, read your answer, and wanted more. 60 Quora referrals in a month means Alston had real answers ranking on a high-authority platform, and those visitors were showing genuine intent.

The combined organic search total of 75 users across Google, Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo tells you the site was beginning to rank. It was not ranking for high-volume queries yet, but it was indexing and appearing for real searches from real people. At 2.5 organic visits per day for the month average, the number was still small. But the trend at the end of the month tells a different story.

The Organic Search Trend That Matters More Than the Monthly Total

Total page view counts get most of the attention in analytics reviews. But for an early-stage site, the direction of organic search in the final week of the month is a better predictor of future growth than the monthly average. Social and direct traffic fluctuate based on how much you post and whether a particular share went wider than usual. Organic grows as your content accumulates authority and rankings.

For Site 1 in April 2019, the monthly organic average was 75 users, or about 2.5 per day. That average includes a slower start earlier in the month. But by the end of April, the daily organic number was trending toward 5 visits per day. That is a doubling of the organic rate within a single month. If that trend held through May and June at even half the pace, the site would be looking at meaningfully higher organic traffic within 60 to 90 days.

This is the pattern Project 24 is designed around. Jim and Ricky have described the growth as flat for a long stretch and then noticeably faster as the content base crosses some threshold of search engine trust. Looking at the late-April organic signal on Site 1, that acceleration was beginning to form. It was not confirmed yet, one week of data does not constitute a trend. But the direction was right, and that is the thing worth tracking month to month.

A practical takeaway for anyone building a content site: when you are reviewing monthly analytics, check the last seven days of organic separately from the full month. Monthly averages flatten recent momentum and can make a site that is actually accelerating look stagnant.

Site 2: 40 Posts, 97 April Page Views, and a Lot of Patience

Site 2 was the younger, smaller property. It had 40 blog posts by the end of April, with the final 10 published during the month. The April page view count alone was 97. Combined with March, the two-month total was 241 page views and 208 unique views.

The average time on page for Site 2 was 19 seconds. That is low. It signals that many visitors landed and left almost immediately, which pulls the average down even for readers who did stay and read. The bounce rate was 95.81%, and the exit percentage was 69.29%.

Taken together, those numbers paint a picture of a site that is not yet earning attention from the search engines and is primarily being visited by the site owner and a small social audience that is not deeply engaged with the content. That is the accurate description of a 40-post site that published 10 of those posts in the current month.

Like Site 1, Site 2 was also down compared to March, which Alston noted. He referenced the hockey stick analogy from Jim and Ricky directly: months two through nine often look like a flatline or even a slight decline before the content starts to compound in rankings and the traffic curve bends sharply upward. That framing is not a rationalization. It is an accurate description of how search authority builds on new domains. Content needs time in the index before it ranks.

Site 2, at 40 posts and a few months old, was still inside that patience window. The question was not whether it was growing fast enough. The question was whether the content was good enough to rank once the trust arrived, and whether adding more posts during that window was the right investment of time.

Site 2 Traffic Sources: Where the 84 Users Actually Came From

Site 2’s April user breakdown: 84 total users, with 38 from social, 33 from direct, 12 from organic search, and 1 from referral.

Social and direct together accounted for 71 of the 84 users. That is the expected shape for a young site without strong search rankings. Social means the site owner sharing their posts. Direct means people typing the URL or accessing it from a bookmark, which at this stage is mostly the site owner checking their own analytics.

The two numbers worth looking at closely are organic Google at 12 users and YouTube at some contribution to the social total. Starting with Google: 12 organic visitors in a month for a 40-post site that is only a few months old is a real signal. It means at least some content was indexed and appearing in search results. Google users spent an average of 6 seconds on the page, which is short, but it confirms real traffic from real searches, not bot visits or internal views.

The YouTube signal mattered as well. Site 2 had only about 10 YouTube videos connected to it, but those videos were generating some click-through to the blog. Alston named this directly as an action item: make more YouTube videos for Site 2, because even a small YouTube presence was contributing real traffic. His observation was that the channel and the blog reinforce each other. A viewer who watches a video and wants more context will click through to the post. A reader who finds the post first may search for the companion video.

Pinterest was not yet active as a traffic source for Site 2. Alston acknowledged it as an untapped channel he planned to explore later, not something he had capacity to add during the current phase of building.

The Income Reality: $0.90 Adsense and a Lifetime Total of $10.26

For April 2019, the income across both sites was $0.90 from Google Adsense. That was down $0.47 from March. There were no affiliate sales on Site 2 in April. Alston described that as disappointing. The expectation had been that sales would continue to grow month over month, but April closed with zero on the affiliate side.

The Adsense lifetime total across both sites was $4.61. Adding a separate $5.65 that had accumulated from earlier in the project, the full lifetime income from both sites at the end of April 2019 was $10.26.

There is no honest way to make $10.26 sound impressive. But setting it in the right context changes what the number means. Project 24 is a 24-month commitment. At the stage of this April 2019 update, months of publishing had produced a small but real and growing search footprint. The model is not designed to generate meaningful income in the first six to twelve months. It is designed to generate it after the content has had time to compound in search rankings.

A $10.26 lifetime total at month eight or nine of a 24-month project is exactly where you expect to be if you are following the system. The question that would matter at month 24 is different: if the site had been live for two full years with consistent content and still sat at $10/month, that would require a real look at the niche, the content quality, and the monetization approach. At the April 2019 stage, none of those questions were overdue yet.

Not sure which niche or skill set to build your site around before putting in months of work?

Answer a short set of questions and get a personalized recommendation at finder.platformproof.com.

Why Adding an Info Product Changes Your Revenue Math Permanently

One of the moves Alston made during this period was adding a second info product to Site 1. Site 1 already had at least one, and he expanded the product library. An info product is a digital product you create and sell directly: a course, an ebook, a template pack, a guide, or a toolkit. The key structural difference from affiliate marketing is ownership of the product and ownership of the revenue.

With affiliate marketing, you earn a commission on someone else’s product. Depending on the affiliate program, that commission might be 4% to 8% on physical products or 20% to 30% on higher-margin digital products. The traffic converts, the customer buys, and you collect your portion. The brand keeps the rest and owns the customer relationship.

With an info product, you collect 100% of the sale price, minus any payment processing fees. The math is completely different. A site that sells 10 copies of a $47 info product in a month earns $470, minus processing fees. The same site converting that same traffic through a 5% affiliate commission on a $47 product earns about $23.50. Same traffic, same conversion rate, roughly 20 times more income per sale.

The real cost of an info product is creation time. You have to build the product before you can sell it. For someone who is already writing posts, managing a YouTube channel, and running two sites at once, adding product creation to the workload is a real commitment. But once the product exists, it can continue selling indefinitely without any additional work on the product itself. The creation is a one-time investment that pays out across every future sale.

Adding a second info product to Site 1 was Alston’s way of giving visitors who were already engaged with the content a natural next step that generated more income per visit than display ads alone. Adsense pays fractions of a cent per page view at low traffic volumes. A product sale on the same page view can pay back many multiples of that.

Honest Drawbacks of Running Two Sites at Once

Running two niche sites simultaneously inside Project 24 is an ambitious approach. There are real costs that do not show up in the traffic numbers or the income dashboard.

The first cost is output speed. When you split your writing and content production between two properties, each one grows more slowly than it would if you focused on one. Site 1 had 93 posts. Site 2 had 40. If all of that content effort had gone into a single site, you would potentially have one property with 130-plus posts and a stronger combined authority signal in the search engines.

The second cost is attention. Two analytics dashboards to monitor, two sets of affiliate links to track and optimize, two social media publishing streams, two niches to stay current in, and two distinct audiences to write for. That is not exactly double the workload, but it is meaningfully more complex than managing one site with a clear focus.

The third cost is income velocity. With no affiliate sales closing on Site 2 in April and Adsense producing less than a dollar for the month, the hours invested in Site 2 during April generated $0.00 in direct return. That is normal for a site at this stage. But it is worth naming clearly rather than softening: content creation is an investment with a delayed return, and spreading that investment across two sites extends the time before either one breaks through to meaningful revenue.

None of this means running two sites is wrong. Diversification has real logic. If one niche stalls or turns out to be too competitive to rank in, the other may grow. But anyone considering the two-site approach should understand the tradeoff going in, not discover it after months of slower-than-expected growth on both sides.

Find Your X

The question this April 2019 update raises for anyone watching is not whether Project 24 works. The real question is whether you have identified the right niche, skill set, and topic to commit 24 months of consistent effort to. A niche with heavy seasonal dips, thin affiliate programs, or a crowded search landscape can stall even a well-executed site. Starting in the right place matters before the first post goes live.

If you are trying to figure out which niche, skill, or method fits your actual background and goals, finder.platformproof.com walks you through a short set of questions and gives you a specific recommendation rather than a list of generic ideas to sort through on your own.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does it take to see real organic traffic with Project 24?

Most Project 24 sites start to see consistent organic traffic between months six and twelve. The first several months are typically dominated by social and direct traffic. Organic builds as search engines index more of your content and begin to trust the domain. Alston’s Site 1, with 93 posts, was averaging 2.5 organic visits per day in April 2019 and trending toward 5 by the end of the month. That is still early-stage organic, but it is a real and growing signal that the content is beginning to rank.

Is it normal for traffic to go down month over month on a new blog?

Yes, and seasonal factors often explain it. Alston used Google Trends to compare his April traffic to the same period in the prior year and found his niche was slightly down across the board. A niche-wide dip means your site is behaving in line with the broader market, not stalling on its own. Month-over-month dips in the first year should prompt investigation before you draw conclusions, but they should not automatically trigger changes to your content strategy or niche.

How much money can you realistically make in the first year of Project 24?

Based on Alston’s actual data, first-year income is likely to be very small. His lifetime total after many months of running two sites was $10.26. Income School frames Project 24 as a 24-month commitment, not a 6-month one. The model assumes content accumulation drives search rankings, which drive traffic, which converts to ad revenue and affiliate or product sales. That process takes time to compound. Expecting meaningful income before month 12 to 18 on most sites is going to lead to frustration, because the timeline simply does not support it at the early stage.

Should you run one blog or two when starting out with Project 24?

One is almost always the better starting point. Running two sites splits your content output, your attention, and your weekly hours, and both sites grow more slowly as a result. Alston ran two simultaneously, which is a real experiment with real data, but neither site grew as fast as it might have with full focus on one. The argument for two is that you reduce risk by not having all your posts in one niche. The argument for one is faster content accumulation, faster search authority growth, and cleaner feedback on what is working before you replicate the approach elsewhere.

What is the difference between an info product and affiliate marketing on a blog?

Affiliate marketing means you promote someone else’s product and earn a commission, typically 4% to 30% depending on the program and product type, when a reader buys through your link. An info product is something you create and sell directly, such as a course, ebook, or guide. With an info product you keep 100% of the sale price minus payment processing fees. The income per conversion is much higher. The tradeoff is that you have to create the product before any revenue arrives, which is an upfront time investment that affiliate marketing does not require.

Does YouTube actually send traffic to a blog in the early stages?

Yes, even in small numbers. Site 1 received 15 users from YouTube in April 2019. Site 2, with about 10 videos connected to it, received some YouTube traffic as well. Alston specifically named YouTube as a traffic source worth investing more into. His observation was that even a modest YouTube presence contributes real clicks to a blog, and more videos would produce more of that traffic. The blog and the channel reinforce each other: viewers who find a video may want to read more detail, and readers who find a post may search for the companion video.

What does a 95% bounce rate on a new blog actually mean?

A bounce rate of 95% means 95 out of every 100 visitors looked at one page and left without clicking to a second page on the site. For a young site with limited internal linking and a small content library, that is within a normal range. It is high, but not necessarily a failure. If visitors are landing, reading the post, getting the answer they came for, and leaving satisfied, that still counts as a successful visit even if it registers as a bounce in analytics. The more important metric at this stage is whether organic traffic is growing, which is a sign the content is ranking and attracting the right audience.

What is the blog-to-social app that Alston uses for automating social sharing?

Alston references a blog-to-social app that automatically pushes published or scheduled posts to his social media channels as soon as they go live. This type of tool connects to a WordPress site and distributes new content to Facebook and other platforms automatically on publish. The benefit is that every post gets social exposure without manual sharing, which saves real time when you are managing two sites and a YouTube channel simultaneously. The limitation is that automated shares tend to generate less engagement than personally written social posts, and the traffic they produce tends to bounce faster because the audience is not specifically searching for the content.

Sources

Alston Godbolt, Project 24 April 2019 Update video (YouTube ID: i4x59ghOJbY)
Google Analytics data for April 1 through April 30, 2019, Site 1 and Site 2, as presented in the video
Google Trends seasonal niche comparison referenced in the video
Google Adsense earnings data referenced in the video
Income School Project 24 course framework, Jim and Ricky, referenced throughout the video