Spaceships & Laser Beams

Stephanie Keeping, Founder

Niagara Region, Ontario, Canada

2025

Spaceships and Laser Beams is turning everyday dinners into out-of-this-world family fun

In 2009, Stephanie Keeping launched Spaceships and Laser Beams from her home in Ontario, Canada, to showcase party ideas that made her baby son giggle. Sixteen years later, the blog has turned into a recipe powerhouse, publishing new recipes daily to help busy families put delicious, budget-friendly meals on the table.

Lift off from the living room

Stephanie Keeping can still hear her infant son’s laughs whenever she blurted out the otherwise nonsensical phrase “spaceships and laser beams!”

Sure, it was just a private joke between mom and son, but it ended up becoming the name of her boy-centric party-supply Etsy shop and the blog she launched alongside it in 2009. She had been frustrated by the lack of “boyish” party décor for her son, and wanted to do something about it.

Back then, the height of digital marketing was something along the lines of social media posts and maybe a static banner swap here and there, but it was Stephanie’s curiosity a year into launching her blog that pushed her to eventually install Google Analytics, a decision she says “changed the trajectory of my life.”

That’s because what she learned shocked her: lots of strangers (thousands of them, in fact) were reading her posts. That’s also when she realized the blog itself was where the real opportunity was.

Orbiting an ad-supported model

In the early 2010s, bloggers debated such matters as whether blinking banners would scare their readers away. But Stephanie took the leap anyway and decided to test the theory for herself.

So she installed her first display units and, by 2017, had even qualified for Mediavine, a Google Certified Publishing Partner.

The experience showed her just how effortless programmatic advertising could be. “It’s like electricity, always on,” she says, adding that the original emails from Mediavine felt “like the business equivalent of love letters” because she finally felt she had found a company she could trust to be on the side of publishers.

With Google quietly matching brands to readers in the background, Stephanie can keep every recipe free: everything from a weeknight-friendly chicken pot pie casserole to a nostalgic ambrosia fruit salad. Ads keep the lights on while Spaceships and Laser Beams keep the comfort food coming.

The strategy paid off far beyond pageviews too. Ad income would become big enough, in fact, that her husband could leave his nine-to-five job.

“Before he quit his job, people thought he supported me in my hobby,” she laughs. “But if you do the math, I retired him!”

By 2025, roughly ninety-nine percent of the site’s revenue comes from ads, an intentional choice that gives Stephanie the opportunity to devote her energy to what matters to her (and her readers) the most: cooking and engaging with each other — all while partners like Google and Mediavine handle the sales mechanics behind the scenes.

“[Ad revenue] changed my life, my family’s lives, and the lives of the people who work for me.”

Future launch plans

With ad income growing, Stephanie could then turn her attention to growing her team. Stephanie’s first hire was a virtual assistant making six dollars an hour, but it added more fuel to the idea that her blog was turning into something bigger.

And it was. Today, her company works with a close-knit team of eight long-time contributors — most of them women who, like Stephanie, chose flexible, family-friendly work on their own terms.

Ad revenue didn’t just change the business; “it’s changed my life, my family’s lives, and the lives of the people who work for me.”

The blog’s earnings have even bankrolled a second venture: building a new agritourism business near Niagara Falls where families can do anything from pet goats to ride horses. “It’s the farm I wish had existed when my son was small,” she says.

The ripple effect from ad dollars also reaches beyond Stephanie’s own enterprises: contractors sometimes list Spaceships and Laser Beams as their biggest client, proof that ad dollars circulate through her wider community.

Next on her agenda: exploring AI tools responsibly (especially without sacrificing reader trust), shoring up algorithm resilience by continuing to diversify her traffic sources, and most importantly, continuing her trademark cadence of “new recipes launching daily.”

“I get to wake up every day and do something I love,” Stephanie says. “Ads didn’t just fund a blog; they funded a life.”

About the Publisher

Stephanie Keeping is the founder of Spaceships and Laser Beams, a website for family-friendly recipes. Originally from Newfoundland and now based near Niagara Falls, she has spent more than a decade transforming her blog into a media brand that reaches millions each month.

Stephanie Keeping writing up recipes for Spaceships & Laser Beams