So I estimate we're seeing 30% fewer reads Aug through Nov. If I add that 30% to the reads we have in the US region and multiply by a modest .0045 payout, our actual earnings are still 14.5% under that. The higher payout helps to offset the balance but it certainly doesn't come close to wiping out the discrepancy.
That doesn't even account for the September into October freebie shakeup. At least the rank issues there were rectified even though some of us lost both the cost of heavy promoting plus the anticipated gains from those promotions in September.
In October, same story even though the rank issue was resolved. The post-promo bump was nowhere to be seen. Again, not only never-realized gains from our monthly promo but sunk costs for the ads as well.
We did see some bit of recovery from freebie runs in November. Still, November has historically been our slowest month in the second half of the year. This year was no different, except for degree. We had 25% fewer page reads in Nov -- with promo and 3 additional new books -- than we did in July when we had no promo whatsoever.
Minimally, I'd say we're down $12,000 from expected earnings since August. We can at least take the costs of our promotions off our taxes, but the unrealized profits and the unexpected cut into the page reads counts can't be recovered.
December seems to be recovering a little more even and we're seeing a bit of improvement post-promos (we've accelerated our promo schedule to accommodate 4 campaigns through mid-Jan), but if the new normal for our page reads continues to be 30% under expectation, then we'll need to see a 30% increase in payout, not the stepped 10% we've seen these last 2-3 months to put us back on parity with what we expect to generate from KU.