13. July 2025
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Flyctory.com Turned Off the Ads – Time for some Transformation

Florian Buechtingby Florian Buechting

At least I did not get any messages or other reactions about it – so I am not sure whether any of you have realized that Flyctory.com underwent a quite change last week. The website is fully ad-free now. I am still thinking of some other ways to create a bit of income (see below), but at the time being, the website is currently cut-off from that. I felt it is a good opportunity to give you a bit of background about it and discuss different scenarios about the future of the project.

 

How Flyctory.com is financed

That’s the easiest question to answer: Flyctory.com is a one man show and it is a die-hard hobby. The technical costs, i.e. server hosting, tools and plugins, software licences etc. are about 50 Euro per month. Travel costs, parking fees, system maintenance, new equipment and all the other stuff is coming on top. The Google ads did not even compensate for the technical expenses. I was hoping that the website might one day pay for a small part of my income one day (in the range of 10 to 20 per cent) – but it became more and more clear that this goal will not realistically be reached – despite some 20% more people visited my website so far in 2025 compared to the equivalent interval in 2024. Thanks a lot for that!

Vice versa, you could say that the only sponsors Flyctory.com ever had were the two employers I was working for in my professional life. Until March 2025, this was the French reinsurer SCOR – since then, I am working in reinsurance consulting for the German company Consurance – thanks to both of them. The trust and above average pay allows me to travel to different places, to concerts, take you into some lounges and hopefully share some other things with you, which are new to me. Apart from travel and parking fees, music somehow gives an “indirect income”, as I typically receive quite a bit of promos for album reviews and can visit concerts for free if I am taking you on a report. Thanks to the companies and partners who appreciate my work as well in the music industry.

 

What is the Rationale for the Change?

I felt that the Google Ads are bearable. However, I here and there heard of technical issues they felt to create for a few users (even more stated that they don’t have issues – I cannot reconcile it). Managing and setting up the ads became more and more bothering. On top of that, it became obvious that many visitors use ad-blockers. I do understand that from an egoistic viewpoint, but you should also be aware of that you always harm the creator, whose content you are just consuming with it. I also did not want to my “nice users” somehow make pay for the ad-blockers of the other people. Additionally, I have to say that especially during the last two months, setting up and controlling the Google ads did not work well from my side any more. It is not the right concept for Flyctory.com any more.

This does not mean that I gave up gaining at least little income with the website. I am still thinking about affiliate marketing, e.g. on travel solutions and concert tickets. This may lead to tax implications, so that I am a bit of shy about it, currently. Furthermore, I am thinking about restructuring the website. So I might go for the one or the other depending on my final decision how things are going on. If there is a more future-proof concept, there might also be something like a Patreon page. I think about publishing content there once I have written it (which can be significantly earlier than the publication on the website). If you like that idea or think about other ways how I could thank you for supporting this thing here, please drop me a message or a comment below.

 

How Can You Support Flyctory.com?

You are just doing so – thanks for it. The key profit for me is that people read and appreciate the contents in here. If you like something, I’d love you to like it on social media, comment on it here or on the platform you heard about it. It helps a lot in regards of motivation to put that much effort into the project (I would guess that Flyctory.com takes at least four hours per day on top of my professional work).

If you really really really like what you read, there is also now a small Paypal donate button on the top right of the website. I highly appreciate that, but I don’t expect that this think will even just lead to fund the technical expenses or compensate for the income by Google ads.

 

What is the Future of Flyctory.com?

There will be changes. The website takes too much time, the gain is too low. Furthermore, I said that the website grew by 20% – but the growth is one-sided, on the travel and sports side. Out of the top 100 posts and pages visited, only 15% are music related, i.e. majorly album reviews and concert reports. That’s too low, based on the effort. The only page on the music side, which is really popular, is my Tour Date Overview (which is the most frequently viewed contents on the website). Reports like the Country to Country 2025 in Berlin caused massive effort, four nights in a row with two hours of sleep – and only one of the in-fact reports is in this Top 100 list. Thus, I have to ask myself whether the contents I am creating is really interesting to people.

The workload is getting too large as well. I will likely reduce the number of posts per week. Currently, there are two per day, it might go down to something like ten per week, i.e. only some days with two posts per day. One thing I struggle with is also that the share of German visitors is dramatically decreasing. Yeah, this blog is in English, but this should not be a barrier nowadays. Let’s see where this trip is leading me. Happy to discuss with you!

 

Postings about Flyctory.com

I sometimes write about the development of this blog, upgrades and other internal topics:

 

Media Reviews – 2025 Top Pick!s

Here are all 2025-published Media Reviews, which lead to a Top Pick! rating:

 

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