Normalkid:Arnold Kim

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.

Hitwise publishes stats comparing Gizmodo and Engadget — two of the most popular “gadget blogs”. The stats are interesting… with Engadget supposedly receiving 6x larger a share of visits than Gizmodo. By “visit”, I presume they mean unique visitor rather than page view based on how they describe the term later on.

On the surface, this surprised me, as I always felt Gizmodo and Engadget were of comparable size… but as with all 3rd party traffic data, you have to be suspicious about their methods of collection and how this might skew the result. Hitwise apparently draws from a pool of national Internet Service Providers (ISP) and generates traffic data based on this. On the surface, it seems like a reasonable method, but I still can’t wrap my head around the belief that Engadget draws 6x the visitors as Gizmodo.

Compete’s records show that they have roughly the same amount of traffic, but their methodology is also subject to error.

Fortunately, we do have direct traffic stats for Gizmodo that is directly measured which shows that Gizmodo draws 5,097,121 unique visitors from the U.S. in one month. If we assume this 6x the visitors stat holds true over a month, that means Engadget should be getting 30,000,000 uniques over a month.

To put that in perspective, that would make Engadget twice as large as Digg (whose stats we also have direct measurements) who “only” attracts ~15 million unique U.S. visitors a month. I don’t think that adds up, and while I have no solid proof, I don’t see how the 6x multiple could be accurate.