2025 Transparency Report

2025 was a hell of a year. In so many ways. But in most ways, it was positive for The New Oil. Let's check it out and see what's ahead.

2025 Goals

Last year my main goal was to manage my time and continue putting out content. In some ways, this was disastrous. As most of you know I didn't put out a single video last year, and even my blog publishing was hit or miss (mostly miss). On the other hand, I personally edited nearly every single episode of Surveillance Report - including the Q&A's - right up until my departure. So in that sense, I put out two videos a week nearly the entire year. Regardless, between a day job that expected overtime, required me to wake up extremely early, and had obnoxious commute times & Surveillance Report, I was burned out more often than not and thus never really had time to do any The New Oil work other than the bare minimum of queuing up news articles and keeping the site current.

On that note, my other major goal was infrastructure migration. My original plan was to self-host out of a homelab. Again, I was unable to make any real progress on this front because renewal time would always sneak up on me while I was too busy to focus on it. However, things did take a dramatic step forward toward the end of the year. In September I was able to carve out some time to migrate Nextcloud to Hetzner, and then Mastodon last month. There's been some hiccups that I'm still working out as I also migrated Mastodon to S3 storage along the way, but in the long run this should be less expensive and more scalable. Ghost was migrated to Pikapods, which costs a fraction of paying for Ghost.org while giving me the full feature set as if I were self-hosting, without the hassle of managing a server at the root level. I've already set calendar reminders and will be migrating additional services as they near renewal time in 2026, lowering my operating overhead even further.

Growth

Given how little content I put out, it's a little surprising to see any growth at all. One thing of note is the blog losing subscribers, but this is due to the migration from Write.As to Ghost. Given how recent the move was, 75 subscribers is pretty good in my opinion, and it continues to grow steadily. I expect we'll be back at full strength and beyond sooner than later.

Regarding the addition of Patreon on this chart, I'd rather people use Ghost, but given that I do my best to mirror content on both platforms (so that way people can sign up on either platform and still get perks) I figure it only makes sense to track that, too.

It's disappointing to see the website visitors fell, but I have to assume that was also due to a lack of "marketing material" like videos and regular blog posts driving people there. Hopefully that will go back up in the coming year.

Finances

Income

As you can see, 2025 was a record year in so many ways. The New Oil's income more than doubled. Sadly though, this trend is in keeping with an observation I made last year: Surveillance Report still accounted for nearly 80% of The New Oil's income. The massive rise in income was largely due to Surveillance Report's acceptance of sponsors. Affiliate links proved to be The New Oil's largest source of sustenance outside of Surveillance Report, followed by direct donations and ad revenue. Sadly, direct donations fell dramatically this year - again, likely due to the lack of consistent content - but it's surprising to see ad revenue went up slightly since, as noted above, I didn't release a single video all year. I guess I made some real good evergreen content.

There is one anomalous entry this year that I don't expect to be prominent again next year: "Special Events." In the second half of 2025, Henry and I were invited by a very generous organization to come and speak at two of their events, one in America and one in Europe. They paid us for our time and covered travel. (We spoke about data breaches and the importance of cybersecurity and protecting customer data in corporate environments, nothing you guys didn't hear every week on the podcast.) While I do have some travel coming up in 2026, I don't expect anything near this level.

On the topic of crypto, all donations came in the form of Monero, mostly to Surveillance Report through either direct donations or XMR Chat. I did spend Monero once to renew my Mullvad subscription, mostly on a whim to try to actually use Monero more. I also think I had NowPayments configured wrong in the past and I wasn't receiving payments made there, but it should be fixed now. I'll continue to keep an eye on it. The only major note I have is that I'm strongly considering dropping BAT support. In addition to not getting any at all this year, Uphold is now requiring users to log in via the app, which is astoundingly abusive. I don't want to do business with a company like that, and BAT is pretty useless anyways. Truth be told, I simply convert it to Bitcoin anyways. Not really anything else I can do with it.

Expenses

Aside from the aforementioned "travel" category, there were a couple other noteworthy changes to expenses this year. First off, infrastructure costs are already falling, and I expect them to decline even more this year as I migrate all my services over to more affordable solutions like Hetzner (as noted earlier in this post). Production costs rose slightly because I moved and had to replace some broken gear or get new gear to adapt to the new recording location. Likewise, I also purchased some new gear like a green screen for filming shorts. Content & Reviews rose quite a bit, but I think that may be more about restructuring how I consider expenses. For example, subscriptions to services like Proton & Tuta may have previously been considered infrastructure but this year were counted as "content" because I use these services a lot in my content. It's really a gray area and not an exact science sometimes.

As with last year, I am still paying off some taxes. Those should be fully done this year - hopefully by the end of Q1 or Q2 - and should be a considerable drop in expenses once that's done.

Finally, I want to be transparent about the "paycheck" category. I dipped hard into The New Oil funds as a personal paycheck this year. Overall it was just over a third of our expenses. I am confident this trend won't continue into 2026. I have mentioned many, many times that the cost of living in my area was sky-high. I was barely keeping up, and honestly if not for The New Oil my wife and I would've gone homeless on more than a couple of occasions. To be clear, I am not a flashy man. I don't drive a fancy car, I don't buy expensive things, and I don't go out very often. In fact, I'm an introverted minimalist. Most often, for date night, my wife and I will order food (that I usually go pick up to save on the delivery fee) and watch a movie at home or play Stardew Valley together. But the cost of living was untenable in our old home. My wife has applied for disability and already been rejected once. We have appealed. And that's to say nothing of the precarious state of disability in the near future. Part of the "paycheck" spending this year went to simply covering rent or routine medical expenses for a couple months when things were tight, but the vast majority went toward helping fund our move to a new state. We no longer live in Texas, and my god can I tell by looking at my bank account. Taking the job at Privacy Guides came with a pay cut in terms of day job salary, and yet somehow I have been able to pay all my bills and then some in our new town. (We do have some new expenses set to kick in in 2026, but I'm still expecting the budget to be far more reasonable than before.) For the first time in years I'm actually building up a savings account again instead of simply treading water. It was painful to dip into The New Oil so much - even though I know that's part of the reason people donate - but it was an investment. I never could've afforded the pay cut to take the job at Privacy Guides in Texas, a job which in turn will enable me to pay more attention to The New Oil again. I should not need to dip into The New Oil funds to pay my personal bills in 2026, or if I do it shouldn't be nearly to this same extent.

2026 Goals

Content

When I announced that I was hired at Privacy Guides, I said more content would be coming soon. That wasn't just some hopeful ambition. When I got hired, there were many discussions about my plans for The New Oil and how we would handle the potential conflicts of doing the same material twice. One thing that was agreed upon by both sides is that neither of us wanted to see The New Oil go away. I have beat to death the horse that at my day job prior to Privacy Guides, I had no free time. While Privacy Guides is still a full-time gig, the lack of commute (and lack of podcast editing on weekends since my departure from Surveillance Report) has freed up massive swaths of time again. Most of the "infrastructure backlog" I mentioned in that blog post is now done (as stated above). There are still a few small things - like finishing my planned calendar for content in 2026 - but overall the heavy lifting is over, which means you guys should start seeing The New Oil churn back to life soon.

You've likely already seen the cadence of blog posts start to pick up as I've smoothed out my workflow. Starting in January I hope to post videos again. My next project is making sure all my shipping prices are correct in the merch store at which point I'll likely add some kind of perpetual discount for paying subscribers. I'm also hoping to bring in some new designs later in 2026. (I still haven't settled on a graphic designer yet, so if you know one please send them my way!)

When I made the switch to Ghost, I played with the idea of mass-importing all my old blog posts with a script. Ultimately I decided not to do that so that I could go through and check old posts for any necessary updates (and also post them to Patreon). I soon realized that a lot of my old posts aren't very good. I've grown a lot since then. Therefore, much of the blog content for 2026 will be revamping and sharing select posts - classics, if you will. I hope you'll enjoy them. New posts will be sprinkled in, too, of course. Video content will likely continue to be new, though I am eager to update some of that stuff, too, as necessary. Shorts will also get more attention as they can be quickly pumped out and I think my new camera setup will allow me to record content more often.

Podcast

One thing I hope to debut at some point in 2026 is a podcast. Don't get me wrong, Henry has been crushing it on the new Surveillance Report 2.0, and of course I am one of the regular cohosts on This Week In Privacy now, but neither of those shows do what the co-produced Surveillance Report did. At This Week In Privacy, we pick about 5 stories and discuss them with each other. At Surveillance Report, Henry picks a handful of stories and dives in deep. In both cases, I feel there are lots of other stories that are being left on the table. I want to do more of a news-style brief covering more stories, like the co-produced Surveillance Report was. I can't promise when this show will debut - perhaps Q2 2026 or so - or exactly what form it will take. I don't want to bite off more than I can chew. But I can already tell that I want to do this and am formulating some loose thoughts.

Funding

Last but not least, I want to make a final call to readers: as part of my offer at Privacy Guides, I had to remove affiliate links from The New Oil to avoid any appearance of conflict of interest, and I cannot accept sponsors. I am now 100% dependent on ad revenue and audience donations. As noted above, Surveillance Report and affiliate links accounted for 85% of The New Oil's income. It is impossible to overstate what a devastating blow this is to our funding and my long-term goals. I am also, admittedly, very worried about what my tax burden will be in 2026. I have a lot less income that I can write off compared to most years, and due to the way The New Oil Media is structured, the IRS considers all that income as personal income for tax purposes. Right now, The New Oil has a small nest egg that should support us for a good while, but it's shocking how quickly that can be drained, especially when Uncle Sam comes knocking.

I am pleading with you: if you get value out of The New Oil, please consider supporting us. For recurring memberships, we only have one tier, $5/month on both Ghost and Patreon. That's one cup of coffee per month. I am working hard to bring more perks to that subscription to increase the value proposition, and I am very much open to suggestions if you can think of any I'm missing. We also offer recurring donations without perks through Open Collective and Liberapay. 2026 is going to be a very difficult year for TNO. Cutting spending is of vital importance. Our savings won't last forever based on the numbers above. Ad revenue should increase as content production resumes, but things like signing up for a membership or even one-time donations through Open Collective, the merch store, or cryptocurrency are all crucial to our long term sustainability and success. Now more than ever I will be relying on the audience to help keep us going. I know as much as any of you that times are tough right now with rampant layoffs, cost of living increases, tariffs, and more. But if you are in a position to donate, it would be so, so appreciated. (And of course, free support like sharing the project around and following us on your platform of choice are always helpful as well.)

Thank you all for your support, for making another year possible, and now for literally changing my life. I could not have made this move or qualified for the job at Privacy Guides without all that you guys have enabled me to do so far. I hope I'll make you proud in new ways in 2026.

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