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.

These were results from an online survey held between Sept 7 – 11th (over a weekend).

How did this get published? They surveyed people online to see if they were obsessed with being online? Obviously, there’s a natural bias. Ask 1000 people who live in a cave how long they can go without going online, and see what results you get.

I am pleased to see Vern, and everyone who responded to Vern’s rant exhibit such emotion over DH4. But as someone who worked on the picture, and has seen a cut of it, I would suggest that all the yakkin’ over the PG-13 issue hang onto their weapons for now. This episode if Die Hard is as good, if not better than the first Movie. And I was there for that one too.

As it turns out, Walter B ended up being “Walter Bruce Willis”, or simply Bruce Willis, the actor. The thread went through the usual back and forth about people not believing it was truly him, but an video iChat session with Mr. Willis demonstrated that it was really him.

I like Bruce Willis as much as the next guy, but what I found most interesting about the thread is that it shouldn’t be a huge surprise that someone like Bruce Willis is keeping tabs on threads on projects they are involved in.

It’s natural for anyone to see what people are saying about them and the projects they are working on. In fact, the founding premise behind Technorati… the concept of vanity searches.

I fully expect that many of key players in their respective industry are watching the top tier sites for their niche.

But a lot of that changed tonight…

The trigger: How I got banned from Digg
The official response: What’s Happening with HD-DVD Stories?
The digg user response? utter chaos (screenshot). The entirety of the digg.com homepage is made up of angry responses.

It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out — the first Web 2.0 Revolt?

Will it all blow over and digg will be back to itself in a few days?
Will it hurt digg substantially?
Will it boost digg to new heights of popularity?

The most ironic thing is that there isn’t much that they can do about it… since the site content is generated by the users, they can choose to close down the site perhaps… but the site will then screech to a complete halt. What can they do but wait it out?

Update: The resolution.