Fake Steve Jobs Dead
Clippy, clippy from Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field
Dan Lyons, a journalist better known to geekdom as the Fake Steve Jobs, has declared the blogging industry kaput. It has expired. It is deceased, it is pushing up daisies, it has joined the choir invisible. It has ceased to be.
Dead man blogging |Notes from the Field | Robert X. Cringely® | InfoWorld.
Daniel Lyons, better known as the Fake Steve Jobs, wrote this for the February 16, 2009 Newsweek.
For two years I was obsessed with trying to turn a blog into a business. I posted 10 or 20 items a day to my site, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, rarely taking a break. I blogged from cabs, using my BlackBerry. I blogged in the middle of the night, having awakened with an idea. I rationalized this insane behavior by telling myself that at the end of this rainbow I would find a huge pot of gold. But reality kept interfering with this fantasy. My first epiphany occurred in August 2007, when The New York Times ran a story revealing my identity, which until then I’d kept secret. On that day more than 500,000 people hit my site—by far the biggest day I’d ever had—and through Google’s AdSense program I earned about a hundred bucks. Over the course of that entire month, in which my site was visited by 1.5 million people, I earned a whopping total of $1,039.81. Soon after this I struck an advertising deal that paid better wages. But I never made enough to quit my day job. Eventually I shut down—not for financial reasons, but because Steve Jobs appeared to be in poor health. I walked away feeling burned out and weighing 20 pounds more than when I started. I also came away with a sneaking suspicion that while blogs can do many wonderful things, generating huge amounts of money isn’t one of them.
I liked the silver lining in the cloud here:
To be sure, some blogs are little goldmines. Gizmodo, a gadget blog run by Gawker Media, had record traffic last month, with 98 million page views, and is “fantastically profitable,” Gawker CEO Nick Denton says. Dooce, a personal-diary blog run by a husband-and-wife team, does between $500,000 to $1 million a year, according to Federated Media, which sells ads for the site. Arrington says TechCrunch did $3 million in 2007 and even more in 2008. He says he could sell the company today, albeit for a lower price than it would have fetched a year ago.
If SEO bloggers went berserk over the Dvorak post on SEO sucking ass, I can’t wait to read what the blogosphere is going to make of this.
Just for the record, I agree with Cringely’s comments.
What Real Lyons/Fake Jobs didn’t understand is that the best blog doesn’t win — or at least, it doesn’t win because it’s the best. Quality, schmality. It’s all about the marketing.
Dead man blogging |Notes from the Field | Robert X. Cringely® | InfoWorld
Location, location, locationLocation, location, location.
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