Nephrologist quits medicine, blogs full time

The story of MacRumor’s Arnold Kim: “How successful does a blog have to be to get a physician to quit? Let’s do some math. Silicon Alley Insider quotes Quantcast numbers reporting a “staggering 37 million page views a month”. This makes MacRumors, #571th biggest site on the whole Internet. If we assume quite modest monetization at $1 CPM (cost per thousand pageviews), he would be making about $37K a month. If he monetizes at $10 CPM that would be $370K a month.”

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Quantcast is a private tracking company, so these numbers are likely legit (unlike Alexa/Comscore numbers which are usually WAY off base, particularly for a technical audience).
CPM on a highly-focused blog like MacRumors is probably more like ~$20-30 depending on the size of the ad. Say $30 for the banner up top, $25 for the second square ad in the middle and ~$18-20 for the side ads. AdSense pays poorly compared to premium advertisers like netshelter and Federated Media will hook you up with.
But to be conservative, 30 + 25 + (15 x 2) = $85 per thousand pageviews. Netshelter takes a small percentage, say 15% because they’re serving the ads and likely doing the sales legwork which means that CPM is ~$72.25 per thousand pageviews.
So we’ll call it $70 per thousand = $2,590,000 per month gross revenue.
3 fulltime employees:
Arnold Kim – Senior Editor.
Jeff Longo – Editor.
Colin Davidson – Contributing Editor.
And probably quite a few freelancers paid by the post (Generally ~$20 per post, depending on the length and substance). Generally fulltimers and freelancers are paid regular bonuses depending on the popularity of what they write. They’re doing about 85-90 posts per month at ~$20 each = $1800 in freelance fees.
Then there’s webhosting, which for a site the size of MacRumors is not insignificant. They are hosted at the Dallas Level3 datacenter, which is *premium* bandwidth so figure a full rack colo’d, between the main site and the forums with at least unmetered 100Mbit connectivity, and power usage, and you’re looking at probably $10-15K/month in webhosting fees alone.
On top of that you have reimbursement for hardware purchases for writers and editors, and pretty quickly that $2M/month is quite a bit less.
Kim’s got a comfortable living, but he’s not getting rich fast. If he were to sell to a mainstream media publication, you’d see his site go for ~$10-15M in cash. This isn’t far from what Ars Technica sold to Conde Nast ~2 months ago for, but Ars is a much bigger site.
Other things to consider are that forums do not monetize especially well, and that that 37M figure is likely including those forums, which probably have a CPM of more like ~$10, so that’s also something to consider.
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Sorry to be overly technical. Big-fish Internet publishing is a bit of an interest of mine.
Disclaimer: I freelance for Ars Technica and have on and off for ~7 years. All of the math above is using publicly available/discoverable information.

Nephrologist quits medicine, blogs full time

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