I’ve been reading Daring Fireball for a while now (long enough to have noticed and be relieved at the eventual removal of the questionable tagline, “Gay for Macs”), and I’ve enjoyed John Gruber’s pithy insights and diligent distillation of the daily deluge of Mac (and other stuff he’s, apparently, “gay for”) related news into a single useful stream of relevant information.
I’ve also been reading it long enough to know that its primary source of revenue is via a single weekly sponsorship, which culminates in a post touting the greatness of whatever it is you’re promoting via the sponsorship, and a link in his sponsorship archive. And for this he charges $1750 a week. That works out to $91,000 a year. Just for hawking someone else’s wares once a week. Not bad work if you can get it. But how can you get it? Well certainly not by describing your own writing as “blather” and then justifying that description by indiscriminately posting whatever prose crawled out of the dank, cobwebbed recesses of your brain. Trust me, I know.
I get it though. His insights are often brilliant. Case in point, today’s dismantling of my dreams of Flash for the iPhone. OK, I haven’t really dreamed of it. It would be nice, I suppose, but it’s been clear for a while that Apple had reasons beyond their spurious claims of poor performance for keeping Flash off the iPhone.
If you doubt that assessment, please do yourself a favor. Read Daring Fireball and then shut the hell up. I will now heed my own advice.
Comments
3 responses to “OK, this is how John Gruber makes $1750 a week on Daring Fireball”
That’s actually not much money for a business, even one without many expenses. I suspect Gruber is receiving twice as much from the Obama team. How else can you explain the shift from a great Apple blog to a mediocre political blog?
I’m not sure I’d call Daring Fireball a “business.” Making $91,000 a year just from the advertising on his RSS feed (to say nothing of the other ads on his main site) is a pretty good chunk in my mind. We’re not talking “Joe the Plumber” wealth here, of course, but this is real money — not a figment of his imagination. And while we’re on the topic of mediocre political blogs, welcome to Room 34!
He also sells memberships and t-shirts. At one point he targeted roughly a third of his revenue would be from each, plus a third from advertising. I’ve no idea whether the t-shirt and memberships are each producing $104,000 a year (next year’s price is listed at $2,000 per week to sponsor the RSS feed).