Is it close when you’re off by 24%?
The begging seemingly never stops at Andrew Sullivan’s DailyDish (DD,) and the justifications offered for the weak dollars aren’t getting any better. And really, how could they?
It takes enormous time, thousands of bucks, and constant attention to keep this blog as content-filled and as current as it is. … You’re are [sic] only source of income for a blog that now reaches almost half a million people a month.
Right, “almost.” We wrote yesterday that Sullivan’s own stats show there were 380,099 unique visitors to the DD in October. The peak was March, at 445,150. Since then, the trend has been downhill, with monthly drops of 45,000 and 18,000, compared to monthly “increases” of less than 2,000.
“Constant attention?” This from someone who takes 4+ weeks of vacation every year and the weekends off? He thinks his blog is “current?” Just because it caught our eye, consider this post from today:
The current mounting debt is a function of boomer selfishness
We’re not boomers here at S,N!, but we’re not about to find an entire generation guilty of robbing because of the fiscal incompetence of a Republican President working with a Republican Congress. We had thought that the current mounting debt was a function of lower tax revenue and increased spending on everything and anything, including preemptive wars. But we do this for free, so what do we know?
I don’t know about Sadly, No!, but Slyblog costs a whole $24.95 a month to run. That includes hosting, domain name, and free MT blogging software. Bandwidth isn’t a problem on a text only site, so no cost there.
So let’s see. If we include, just for kicks, domain name registration costs (I paid $70 for two years) and the start up fee (one time $50), Slyblog costs about $420 a year.
Of course, I could have hosted everything for free at blogspot with ads or for $60 a year no ads. But that’s not as much fun as haveing a vanity domain name.
So uh, does andrewsullivan.com really costs “thousands of dollars” a year? And if so, isn’t Sully getting taken for a colossal ride?
There is the possibility that he’s employing someone to be a real webmaster, and he can deduct the salary on his schedule C, so it could be ‘thousands’ of dollars: Like 6 or 7 thousand, more like.