I'll admit I never pay attention to any ads on sites as many others do. To me I take the same response as ad's on TV. That is if they ain't funny I don't bother paying attention to them. The Geared ad caught my attention mainly from the 2 million downloads (Rivaling Flight Control!). I continued reading on and got a nice chuckle out of the ad, especially the bottom line. I'd like to say well done for making my day Bryan and if I didn't already have Geared I would have bought it just for that ad. Also I'm not sure if the ad prices are correct but by going on his stats to have a full screen banner up the top is $7.80 per hour $187.20 per day $1310.40 per week $5616 per month $67392 per year Looking line Arn and Blake are rolling in it
Dogmeat, here's the ad you missed (click for larger view): As far as rolling in cash, many people have a gross misunderstanding on the costs of running a large site like this. I believe in a recent tweet from Arn he said he has 7 dedicated servers for running Macrumors and TouchArcade now. For good, mid range speed and capacity units with some crazy bandwidth limits you're looking at least $300 to $500 per month, each. So $2100 to $3500 right there gone every month. Another note is that TA pays for all the games that their guys play and review, no promo codes used or allowed. Think for every one article you see, they've bought that game for several people, and for every article you see, they've probably bought several more apps for everyone "on staff" to check out. Since they generally only talk about the good or interesting games, you miss the fact that their iTunes bill is probably well over $1000 per month Yet another note, look at how these guys are at every major event- CES, MacWorld, GDC, PAX and PAX East, WWDC, i360Dev... All those trips are paid for by TA/Macrumors, multiple guys in many cases. I'd guess $12,000 per year, roughly $1000 per month (I've racked up more than twice that amount in a busy year alone so it's probably fair) The final gotcha is this Macrumors/TA is Arn's only source of income, so he's gotta collect a paycheck from it too. Let's say he's getting $42,000 per year, or $3500 per month. Sounds like a lot of money to the younger crowd here I am sure, but there's no way I could live off that amount. It's probably more. So using my estimations we're looking at more than $9,000 per month, $108,000 per year to keep TA and Macrumors functioning for our enjoyment.
Thanks for your analysis Don't want to get into specifics but... - We do accept/use promo codes, but we don't wait for them or generally request them - There are 10 dedicated servers across 3 sites (macrumors, appshopper,toucharcade), TA uses 2 of them - The 6 figure income reference was for MacRumors, not TA. arn
I knew about AppShopper, but had no idea about MacRumors. Damn, arn knows how to create a successful website..Lol
