Some people consider me a problogger but I can assure you that my online activities, which includes blogging, are hardly my main source of income. While I did get my first AdSense commission last year, I’m still in the red as far as revenues versus expenses go. Just look at the chart below.

As you can see, even if I include the income I expect to receive to my received revenues, I’m still far from recouping my expenses. In this sense, blogging, and other online activities, is still very much a somewhat expensive hobby instead of a business or a sideline. But I definitely plan to turn my online life into a more serious sideline and maybe possibly, as a full-time gig (like some others that have taken the plunge).

Anyway, I’m proud to say that my received revenues include the aforementioned Google AdSense commission as well as a direct advertiser and compensation for blogging. The compensation and the direct ad are actually individually larger than my received AdSense income. So definitely, man does not live on AdSense alone. As for the receivables, AdSense is just one of my pending sources of income; I plan on building the others soon.

Now, what are my expenses? I consider only two basic categories: overhead and recurring. My recurring expenses only includes Web hosting and domain registrations (dated since 2003), and a portion of my Internet charges, viz. home DSL, Internet cafés, Wi-Fi access, and dial-up cards. I consider the rest of the Internet usage as personal consumption, much like food and gasoline, instead of as a “business expense.” Note that the apportionment between what I consider as personal or business expense is quite arbitrary and certainly won’t pass an accounting audit.

The overhead expense, on the other hand, is simply half of what I paid for my desktop and laptop PCs. Like with my Internet charges, I consider the remaining half as a personal expense, similar to my purchase of an iPod. As is obvious from the chart, I’m still far from getting back my PC investment. Hehehe.

I deliberately omitted the actual figures from the graph. But it should be quite easy to infer ballpark figures.

How about you, are you in the red or in the black with respect to your revenues and expenses?