Normalkid:Arnold Kim

Yesterday was my last day at my full time job as a physician. I plan to work on MacRumors.com and other web projects full time.

The most likely reaction I expect from regular MacRumors readers is “You weren’t working on MacRumors full time already?”

As crazy as it seems, for these past 8 years, MacRumors has been a hobby or part-time job. I think most people would have made this move long before me, but the momentum of my “other” career made it difficult for me to break free.

I started MacRumors.com in February of 2000. I was in my 4th and last year of medical school. I had been dabbling in the web for fun and decided to focus a natural interest of mine (Apple) into a website. My work on the site has since had its ups and downs. Over the next 8 years, I completed medical school, an Internal Medicine residency, a fellowship in Nephrology and even worked two years in private practice as a physician (Nephrologist).

During that time, I’ve been fortunate enough that my hobby has become successful enough that I am able to transition it into my career. While the trend may have been clear for past couple of years, I was slow to recognize it.

One of the most frustrating things over the years, however, has been my inability to dedicate the proper time to improve MacRumors as I might have wanted. In addition, as a web-tech-guy I constantly have ideas and plans for other web projects that I’ve never had the time to pursue. By settling on this as my career, I will be able to execute some long standing plans.

Wish me luck!

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arn@normalkid.com

The secret to success on the internet can be boiled down to one simple accomplishment: building traffic.

That’s it. If you have a site that attracts a lot of visitors, you will be able to make money. On the internet, traffic equals power, which subsequently equals money.

Depending on the topic of your site, however, it may be easier and harder to generate that money. But even a seemingly ridiculous site such as HotorNot.com has a revenue of $5-$10 million a year (with the bulk of it being profit). If you aren’t familiar with the site, the premise is simple: rate other users on how “hot” they are on a scale of 1 to 10. That’s it. You vote, and get sent to the next photo. When I first saw it, I thought it was amusing but saw no way they could make money from it. As it turns out, they managed to turn it into a casual dating site with a simple subscription service that allowed you to make connections. This simple $6/month revenue stream added up to a revenue stream of up to $10 million a year,

Now, generating revenue might not be enough if your expenses are high. One notable site that has never made a profit is YouTube. To be fair, I don’t think generating a steady profit was part of the original game plan. As a venture capital funded site, millions of dollars were invested in the infrastructure, employees and bandwidth to create what became a “killer app” for the Internet. In the end, the founders and investors did make an enormous profit on the site through its sale to Google for $1.6 billion dollars. Why did Google pay $1.6 billion to buy a site that has never made a profit? Because Google understands more than anyone the value of traffic, and truly believes that traffic = power = money.

As the founder of a well trafficked site, and with plans to establish other sites, the concept of building traffic is always on my mind. I have ideas of how other sites established their user base, but here are a few reasons MacRumors has grown to be as popular as it has:

- Good domain - I was fortunate to be able to pick up “MacRumors.com” as an expired domain in 2000. It’s a generic keyword-rich domain which perfectly encapsulates the topic of the site. It’s easy to remember, and well ranked in searches related to rumors.

- Addictive Content - it’s no coincidence that I started a web site surrounding rumors about Apple and the Mac. I was already an addict. I scoured messageboards and news sites around the web for hints about future Apple products. I don’t expect everyone to understand how this particular topic is as addictive as it is… but clearly it’s not just me.

- Little Competition - We weren’t the first rumor site on the scene. But what was interesting was that there used to be a clear divide between rumor sites and news sites in the Mac web. “News sites” would not report on rumors. They purposefully ignored the entire subcommunity. That seems ridiculous now, as the lines have since blurred, with even mainstream media covering Apple rumors. But I’d say that gave us a 4 year head start over other Mac sites. They weren’t willing to cater to the rumor-audience, so MacRumors was one of only a few rumor destinations for those intervening years.

XKCD is a web comic created by 23-year-old physics major and programmer Randall Munroe who is actually making a living off his web-comic. Here’s a sample comic that I found particularly funny… but you have to be a programmer to appreciate it:

The New York Times just did a profile on Mr. Munroe and revealed some interesting stats with regard to making a living as a web comic-strip writer.

XKCD.com attracts 500,000 unique visitors a day and delivers over 80 million page views in a month. There are no ads, however. Instead, Munroe appears to make a living off T-shirt sales. They reportedly sell “thousands” of T-shirts a month, which supports him and his partner “reasonably well.” It’s apparently not that easy to find this success since Munroe estimates he’s one of only two dozen web comic authors who actually make a living off of their comics.

If we wildly guess at $10 profit per T-shirt, that gives us a range of $20,000-$99,000 (2000-9999 T-shirts) revenue a month which projects out to $240,000 to $1,188,000 a year in revenue. So, the duo probably pull in the mid-hundreds-of-thousands a year. Not bad at all, and a surprising revenue stream. In some ways it makes sense, in that advertising revenue for comics can’t be very lucrative. Regardless, it’s refreshing to see someone have a non-advertising revenue stream.

Another interesting tidbit from the article is that Munroe talks about the power of the Internet with respect to niche markets:

On the Internet, he said, “You can draw something that appeals to 1 percent of the audience — 1 percent of United States, that is three million people, that is more readers than small cartoons can have.”

He’s built a business succeeding in his niche market, despite the fact that “mass appeal” of a technical comic strip is relatively small.

It would seem a physically bound book would be an obvious step to take, and it appears its in the works in some form.

From my point of view, the biggest news this week is that ArsTechnica was purchased by Conde Nast for a rumored $25 million. The acquisition itself has been verified, but the price will likely never be publicly confirmed.

For those who aren’t familiar with ArsTechnica, it’s a technology news site that has distinguished itself over the years by offering intelligent and thoughtful articles. With the recent trend of rapid-fire blogs and “breaking” news blurbs, it’s to their credit they’ve been able to sustain their audience and reputation.

I don’t know the founders of Ars personally, but am certainly aware of their work. The story goes that it was started in 1998 by Ken Fisher (and Jon Stokes) out of “boredom” in graduate school and apparently stayed a hobby for the first 6 years. Ken Fisher touched a bit on the start of Ars in a recent video interview with Kara Swisher. I’m not sure the exact sequence of events, but today Ars is reported to have a staff of 8 people who will now be working for Conde Nast (publisher of Wired).

Their decision to sell is interesting. Online ad revenue has been on the rise over the past 5 years, and I’m certain they are benefiting from this phenomenon. With their technical audience, they should be able to attract very favorable ad rates and sponsors.

Assuming the founders were making a solid profit on a yearly basis in-line with a $25 million valuation (let’s assume they didn’t get a “can’t refuse” offer), what are the motivations for selling a self-sufficient business that from-all-that-I’ve-read has been their “baby”?

10 years is a long time, so I suppose they were ready to move on for various reasons. While the writers are moving to Conde Nast, I don’t see how the co-founders would stay there beyond a compulsory period of time with $25 million in their pockets. I’ll be very curious to see what they do next, and wish them luck.

Update: Fisher explains the motivation… they want to built the site up further which requires corporate backing. And it appears he will be staying to continue building the site.