

King of the Apple geeks: Gruber as one-man media company - adamhowell
http://www.businessinsider.com/king-of-the-apple-geeks-2009-8

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pmjordan
_"I just try to write good stuff."_

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.

~~~
ZachPruckowski
More importantly, his signal-to-noise ratio is very high. Obviously, being
very narrowly focused helps a lot with that. But it's nice to know that every
post he makes is going to be worth my time. Most bloggers are very hit-and-
miss, such that 1-in-10 (or at most 1-in-3) posts are really good, and the
rest range from filler to kinda-interesting. Gruber doesn't write a whole lot,
but nearly everything he writes is good.

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jonshea
$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.

~~~
fromedome
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.

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

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

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blazamos
Gruber's talk with Merlin Mann from this year's SXSW is a gem.

<http://daringfireball.net/2009/03/obsession_times_voice>

<http://www.43folders.com/2009/03/25/blogs-turbocharged>

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gstar
Gruber is polarising, but that's precisely why he's 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.

~~~
boundlessdreamz
exactly! don't know whether he is obnoxious or not but his writing is good.
When he writes long articles (1 in 15) I read every word where as I just skim
over most articles from techcrunch.

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bd
Anybody else having (regular) troubles accessing articles at The Daring
Fireball? For me it usually takes very long time till they appear, sometimes
it just times out.

It's weird that with such revenue he doesn't use some better hosting and/or
CMS.

~~~
ionfish
No... DF is always quick for me. It's built on Movable Type, so essentially
the whole thing is static HTML anyway, which is fast.

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.

~~~
bd
You are right, it's something about the network. On my notebook (physically in
Europe) it took 25 seconds to wget DF's index page while from ssh session on
server in California it was instantaneous. Though it's strange that it's so
specific - I don't have problems with other sites.

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cjlesh
I read Daring Fireball, and I think the writing is excellent, but I've always
thought it was a close cousin of astroturfing.

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.

~~~
mechanical_fish
If you're going to issue unsubstantiated smears you should at least use the
correct terminology: _Astroturfing_ is the simulation of an entire grassroots
movement, not merely the simulation of one guy's unsolicited opinion.

~~~
ZachPruckowski
Further, astroturfing by definition involves employment or contracting. If you
aren't directly or indirectly paid for it, it's not astroturfing, it's
misrepresentation.

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georgekv
Well written, humorous, and knowledgeable (mac) geek. What's not to like?

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Poiesis
Someone creates quality content and gets paid decently for it: news at 11.

