20,000,000 Pages Served, No Paycheque

Dirk Pilat - 2001.12.24

Evening all!

I know you don't have the time to read this article with all the holiday preparations you have to do (BTW, anybody knows what to give a 34 year old Mac-hating woman, who is far more intelligent then oneself, for Christmas?), but recently I stumbled over this article by Low End Mac's publisher, Dan Knight. For more than a year this chap is now trying to make a living from running a pretty damn good Macintosh site, which is currently getting more than 800,000 hits per month.

The content is good, the writers are great (apart from that jerk who writes the UK column), the layout is simple (and you can read it on low-end Macs). Enough praise: The fact that struck me rather peculiar was that this site, which serves more ads that you can shake a stick at, makes not enough money to give this chap a paycheque, and I am sure that's not due to the expensiveness of the authors (trust me on that one), but to the low click-rate that the ads get. Really, when was the last time you clicked on a banner? Think about that, all of you out there who think they can make a living with the World Wide Web.

To rake in 800,000 hits per month, your site really has to be either an established class act like lowendmac.com or offer pornography (or be Microsoft's update server, where millions of Microsoft minions have to log on for their latest update to get their crappy OS finally working). For comparison, my own brilliant sites - Mattbianco.com, Dirkpilat.com, and thepilum.com - were serving 1,300 hits at most per month (and hey, this is class we are talking about. Well, not quite. Well, they're crap really. But still...)!

So what in the world do you have to do to make a living from a site that gets 800,000 hits per month? Weeeeelll, there's the dreaded micropayment idea, that would take a cent of your credit card every time you read one of my articles (although they're obviously worth much more), but in the age of cybercrime and credit card fraud, I rather not spread my credit cards anymore.

Then there is the good old subscription system, but that would obviously reduce readership by about 800,000. So for poor Dan Knight, there's a lot to think about, and maybe he shouldn't give up the day-job that quickly....

Anyway, I wish you all a great 2002 and a peaceful holiday .

Cheers me Dears

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