King of the Apple geeks: Gruber as one-man media company
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
The article's author might consider that a humorous quip, but I think that's the crux of it, really. DF is always well written and usually well researched (and when it isn't, for whatever reason, he will follow up with a correction). Unlike others, John's not scared of going into technical detail where necessary.
Not always easy and certainly rarely painless to break those schedule/content cycles, but it can be done and, if we're to have anything resembling newspapers around in a decade, it has to be done. By somebody...and soon.
The Daring Fireball feed sponsorship costs $2,500 for _one week_. That’s $130,000 a year right there.
http://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/
The Deck pulls in $180,000 a month with 45 affiliated content sources. So if the profits are divided equally, or if Gruber earns the average revenue, then that’s $4000 a month. Some of the affiliate blogs hardly ever produce content and other blogs hide the ad at the bottom of the page, so I doubt that they divide revenue equally between them. I’d be very surprised if Daring Fireball didn’t pull down at least 3 times the Deck average. Call it $150,000.
That would put us at $280,000 per year even before T-Shirt sales.
You're assuming that the RSS feed sponsorship is sold out, and is sold out at rate card rates. Those are very aggressive assumptions. I estimated about $60,000 in annual revenue from RSS, assuming a 30% average discount to rate card rates and 75% fill rate. (Reductions of 25% to 50% are not uncommon in online advertising.)
For The Deck, founder Jim Coudal told me that $4,000 a month to the publisher is in the ballpark but a little low. So I assumed about $60,000 a year, or $5,000 a month. (Don't forget that The Deck itself is a for-profit enterprise, and takes a hefty cut.)
So I got to about $120,000 a year before t-shirt sales. Like I said... could be much higher. But I wanted to err on the side of caution, especially in this ad economy.
I admittedly don't know very much about this sort of thing. Is being sold out for the next month good, or cutting it close? If it's the former, it would be safe to assume Gruber's selling at the rate card rate most of the time, no?
Very satisfying to see one man armies getting so successful.
Much as I think he's a bit obnoxious, I read his blog regularly. I really admire his respect for his craft (vs say, techcrunch), as well as the niche he's carved out for himself.
It's weird that with such revenue he doesn't use some better hosting and/or CMS.
If you view source, you'll see a time at the foot of the document, which I presume is how long it took to render. According to that, the front page currently takes around 0.0014 seconds.
Perhaps you should see if there's some kind of network problem between you and the DF server which might explain why you're having these problems.
Here's how it works in my head:
1) Gruber writes stuff Apple likes 2) Apple feeds Gruber exclusive information 3) More people read Gruber for exclusive information, seeing a message that Apple likes 4) Gruber profits from increased traffic, and tries to continue to please Apple
Maybe I'm way off base, but Apple is so damn secretive that the information he gets must somehow be approved. It's like Apple doesn't allow their employees to blog, except Gruber.
Further, Gruber's not been afraid to come down on Apple for things, like when Apple announced the iPhone tethering and MMS and in fine print said "Not in the US", or many of the App Store shenanigans prior to this one, and for the iPhone developer's NDA, just to name ones off the top of my head.