Normalkid

By now, many people have seen the New York Times article about me and my quitting medicine to pursue a career on my websites. Overall, the response has been amazing, and generally very positive. The article itself was amongst the most emailed articles at the New York Times for that day. Besides being a surprising story (‘M.D. quits medicine to blog’), I think it struck a chord in a lot of people.

Job and career satisfaction are always hot issues and I suspect there are a lot of people have that secret career in the back-of-their-mind that they wished they had pursued.

Understandably, there was a lot of coverage in the blogs and especially from those with similar aspirations. Several people had emailed me about thoughts and advice on building a site. I don’t know if there’s a magic formula, but I’ll share some thoughts in a later post.

Finally, there were a few people who found offense to my career switch. I understand some of the issues surrounding it, but I think the best thing I can say is it was a very difficult decision for me at the time, and also a very personal one. Some people are focusing on the money, but in reality, it was a lifestyle and family choice. I suspect that given the same options, most people would have made the same decision.

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.

In case you don’t follow web, tech, and social news sites, there’s a vocal minority that claims that Twitter is the next best thing since sliced bread.

One of the arguments of pro-Twitter bloggers is that Twitter is quickly becoming one of their top traffic referrers based on their web logs. A particularly noteworthy graph is from Calacanis who describes that Twitter has sent ~45,000 people to his startup (Mahalo) in the past 6 months.

That’s an impressive number, of course, and helps drive interested entrepreneurs and bloggers to start their own twitter accounts to try to recreate this effect. And before I get to my point, Twitter is certainly a great self promotional tool, and I think it’s a great tool to interact with your peers and others interested in you and your business. However… that being said, there’s some fine print to these statistics.

The way Twitter works is that people “follow” you to see your updates. So you tell your friends, your fans, your customers to “follow” you on twitter. It’s kinda like a private RSS feed for them. They see updates from you and anyone else they follow. (me on twitter)

So, of course, if you link to your site, people who follow you might click through. That’s great… but it’s a closed pool of people. A closed pool of people who already know who you are and were interested enough to “Follow” you on Twitter.

So, how many of those ~45,000 visitors to Mahalo were actually unique individuals? No more than 21,000 (or whatever number of followers Calacanis had at the time). And these are people who already have an active interest in Calacanis. Realistically the 45,000 may represent only 4000 distinct people clicking on multiple links over those 6 months. In many ways, you are preaching to the choir. And while there is value in that, perhaps not as much as the raw numbers would lead you to believe.

As a comparison, I think there’s more (different?) value in 45,000 visitors from Google or scattered across multiple other sites, as those possibly represent “fresh” visitors.

That being said, I think Calacanis is doing it right, in that he’s driving traffic to his startup rather than his blog (where he recruited his Followers). I think if you are simply trying to drive Twitter traffic back to your blog (or where ever you recruited your Followers), then you are simply driving the same people back to the site who would have gone their anyway (via Web or RSS). There’s no harm in that, but then the warm-fuzzy feeling you get from your Twitter referrals may be even more misleading.

As a blogger or site owner, you are keenly aware of the activities of other sites on the internet, especially in your field. In particular, you might notice when other sites properly credit your site for either original news or even finding a particularly unique link. This business, however, can get messy with sites accusing other sites of wrongdoing or simply poor sportsmanship. As a result proper attribution can become a big issue. It comes to my mind now as TheInquisitr wrote an excellent summary of their linking and attribution policy.

In some cases the offense is clear: exclusive content or screenshots that are simply “lifted”, republished and no attribution given to you. Of course, this is the most offensive of actions, and fortunately, it is a relatively rare occurrence. Ironically, this used to be a bigger problem with mainstream news sites. As blogs were just emerging as a news source, I’d frequently see “legitimate” news sites reference emerging news with a wave-of-the-hands “word on the internet is…” and refuse to link to the original sources. Fortunately, this trend has dwindled as the line between blogs and media have blurred.

An equally deceptive, yet growing trend I’ve noticed is one where sites will rewrite original content and even include a link back to the original source, but hide the link in a way that makes it entirely un-obvious that the original site even exists.

Instead of writing “BlogXYZ.com writes…”, they might just report the news “We’ve heard that ABC is going to be great…” and then maybe link one obscure word later in the text back to the original source. While they’ve technically linked back to the source, the end result is the same as the first scenario, taking credit for the information.

I can’t really offer a great solution on this issue. I do know what the end result: you are far less likely to link to them, which, in turn, over time, will result in them being far less likely to link to you. This circle tends to feed on itself.

So, in the end, play nice and attribute properly.