King of the Apple geeks: Gruber as one-man media company

http://www.businessinsider.com/king-of-the-apple-geeks-2009-8

by adamhowell • 17 years ago

69 24 17 years ago

pmjordan• 17 years ago

"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.

TetOn• 17 years ago

This is exactly right, and down in comments, the author mentions that larger operations can't let content dictate schedule without a whit of awareness that perhaps the larger operations are failing precisely because they are too frequently letting arbitrary schedules (i.e. hewing too tightly to a historical "way we've always done it") dictate content.

Not always easy and certainly rarely painless to break those schedule/content cycles, but it can be done and, if we're to have anything resembling newspapers around in a decade, it has to be done. By somebody...and soon.

ZachPruckowski4• 17 years ago

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.

jonshea• 17 years ago

$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.

ZachPruckowski4• 17 years ago

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.

fromedome2• 17 years ago

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.

karzeem• 17 years ago

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?

blazamos2• 17 years ago

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

vijayr• 17 years ago

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.

georgekv• 17 years ago

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

gstar• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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.

cjlesh• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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.

ZachPruckowski4• 17 years ago

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.

ZachPruckowski4• 17 years ago

That's not astro-turfing, it's traditional journalism. Sources generally give more details to reporters who they like. Astro-turfing would be if Gruber actually worked for Apple while writing this stuff. It's generally true that the result is sources controlling journalists more than they should, but at worst, Gruber's as ethically shady as WashPost journalists.

Further, Gruber's not been afraid to come down on Apple for things, like when Apple announced the iPhone tethering and MMS and in fine print said "Not in the US", or many of the App Store shenanigans prior to this one, and for the iPhone developer's NDA, just to name ones off the top of my head.

po• 17 years ago

Gruber may benefit from Apple because employees at apple give him good information, but he doesn't hide it. Furthermore, especially in this case, he's calling them out. He usually doesn't let his love of the company from clouding his appraisal of their actions.

blazamos2• 17 years ago

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

bd2• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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.

bd2• 17 years ago

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.

dchest• 17 years ago

Could be because of come problems connecting to The Deck ads servers -- happened to me once. Check if http://www.northmay.com (ad server) loads fast/loads at all.

Poiesis• 17 years ago

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

King of the Apple geeks: Gruber as one-man media company

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