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Comment by jonshea | Hacker News Reader

$125,000 in annual revenue is way low.

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.

http://decknetwork.net/

That would put us at $280,000 per year even before T-Shirt sales.

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Hi jonshea:

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.

In any case, its definitely in six figures, and that is a good achievement for a one man blog. Purely from a financial point of view, the other blog mentioned in the article, Dooce, is even more interesting, she makes $40k per month http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Story?id=4836738&page=1 (and that figure is a year old)

Very satisfying to see one man armies getting so successful.

He's sold a sponsorship for every week this year. (I went back and checked.)

Ah nice, thanks. But we don't know the rate. Probably big discounts for repeat buyers.

http://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors pretty much always shows the feed sponsorship as being sold out for at least a month.

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?

I subscribe to his RSS feed. I usually see the same companies over and over, and my impression (based on no actual facts or numbers, as I'm lazy) is that he sells in multi-week increments at a discount to people like Omnigroup or major iPhone app companies.

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