About
Most business advice restates numbers it did not gather. The figure gets quoted, then quoted from the quote, until nobody can say where it came from or when it was last true. This site is built the other way round.
What is here
The working numbers behind a small web business — what sites earn from ads, what an ad network asks for before it will take you, how big a market is, what an import tax actually costs — measured here and dated. Each one states the number, how it was obtained specifically enough to repeat, and when we last checked it. Where a figure came from a published source rather than our own measurement, it says so.
That has a consequence worth stating out loud: these numbers go stale. A figure from six months ago is worse than today's, which is why every one of them carries the date it was checked. If that date is old, treat the answer as old.
How we handle being wrong
Every number we publish carries a confidence grade, and we track them the same way internally:
| Grade | Means |
|---|---|
| A★ | We measured it ourselves |
| A | A primary source — the vendor's own price list, the statute, the official filing |
| B | Two independent sources that agree |
| C | Directional only. A range, never a forecast. |
| ? | Genuinely unknown. We say so rather than estimating. |
When two sources disagree, we keep both and show the disagreement, because a conflict between two credible sources is more informative than whichever one we happened to read second. We do not quietly overwrite a number and hope nobody noticed.
How this is paid for
Advertising, and eventually sponsorship of the email list. That is the whole model. It means two things you are entitled to know: ads on this site are served by Google and are not endorsements, and no advertiser has ever seen a number before it was published, or changed one after.
Who makes it
One person, no team and no funding. That is the reason the work is narrow, and the reason it can afford to be slow and correct rather than fast and approximate. The operator is contactable at contact@plainreckoner.com, and identifiable on request to anyone with a legal reason to ask.
If a number looks wrong
Every figure here names its source and the date it was checked, so it can be verified rather than taken on trust. If one does not hold up, tell us and we will check it against the source and update the page. Email contact@plainreckoner.com.
If you found us in your server logs
Some of what is measured here comes from reading two small files that
publishers already put on their sites for software to read:
robots.txt, which says what automated visitors may look at,
and ads.txt, which names who is allowed to sell their ad
space. We read those and the front page, slowly, one site at a time,
using a program that gives its name and can be turned off.
What the crawler does, and how to stop it.