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Comment by AndrewWarner | Hacker News Reader

It really is. That's why I don't understand why he wouldn't channel that creativity towards a business that has more meaning. Still, he he won't, you and I can by learning from him. Seems like a smart guy.

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Why would he? This is essentially passive income -- a more traditional business requires more traditional hours and workload. If you have an automatic moneymaker, you don't trade that in for something you have to tend to.

yes but its putting considerable time and intellect into a very vulnerable asset. google inevitably changes the way it does things and then its time to start over. and with each keyword he is competing with passionate and dedicated people (the winning side of any war is filled with these) that view their efforts as something more than a hack or arbitrage.

While that's a good point, Google would basically have to remove adsense to have any measurable effects on this business.

These aren't worthless placeholders, they're valuable collections of decent information. He is speeding the ranking process a bit, but that would come eventually.

It doesn't seem like he is spending that much time to accomplish this kind of income. He IS handling the interesting parts(data mining the google data.) and outsourcing the boring/time consuming bits of writing the actual content.

I don't understand the logic that says you shouldn't do something because what your doing today may not be possible a year from now.

In the meantime, this guy is pulling in a pretty healthy paycheck; I would assume he will be better prepared than most to handle any changes that come up.

think of it terms of option value. its relatively cheap to invest talent into something with bigger (as a function of time) payoff. when you make the point he is talented you are right, this makes the discrepancy in option value larger.

That clarifies it for me, thank you.

I dont understand why you would call this a business that doesnt have much meaning. Hes basically a more modern version of newspapers, and magazines. They hire editors, and content producers, pick topics of interest, and make money off of advertising.

So from my perspective hes just a smaller scale Rupert Murdoch.

Too many newspapers today are just publishing tons of stuff from the wire and then writing one or two local fluff stories to go along with the local sports scores and grandma's bragbook.

why couldn't he do both? having a less meaningful job that you use to fund a more meaningful but lower paying one is a common solution.

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