I'm using a throwaway account here to protect my privacy.
I'm currently making between 90k and 110K a month in revenue as a sole employee running a fairly large active Web community (< 2500 Quantcast). The focus of the community is a niche market with very little competition but we fare well by providing good value to our community.
Our revenue sources breaks down as follows:
* 40/50K/month in subscription revenue
* 25K/month in adsense revenue
* 4k/month in other ad revenue (Ebay, Amazon, Viglink etc)
* 30K/month in license and royalty revenue
As the sole employee, my primary responsibilities are all of the development of the platform, all system administration, all marketing and business activities, financials, and I also provide all the primary user support for the site. We have approximately 120 administrators and moderators who are volunteers, and we also have 4 individuals who are independent contractors who receive a set amount every month to lead different parts of our site and lead those volunteers.
Our platform is primarily based on Amazon Web services but includes physical servers from other hosting platforms. Platform as a service providers that we use include Cloudkick, Chartbeat, Geckoboard, Dynect, and SendGrid.
The reason why we have been so successful is we cater to a hobbyist market and operate on a very generous freemium model. Our subscription revenue is solid and predictable, and we experience very few chargebacks because we have consciously decided not to do automated renewals. Our license and royalty revenue is due to licensing agreements we have with third parties who utilize our content and services and APIs, as well as mobile device makers who serve our content (primarily to the Android and iOS market).
All of the above is a full time job and I rarely ever have a day off, although I have a tremendous amount of flexibility with my schedule.
For the most part I do. Large online communities have their challenges though with respects to the members. But I am an active participant on the platform with respect to it's content so I do enjoy the community.
I'm really not sure how to answer the question about running it indefinitely. I'm someone that doesn't like to sit still for long so I'd bet that I'll engineer a sale of this business someday in the next few years and move on to scratch another itch.
Just a guess, but between his indep contractors and volunteer moderators (as well as all those members), I'm betting he doesn't feel too alone. I have a tendency to say "we" when talking about running a group I started and it has < 200 people :)
I'm currently making between 90k and 110K a month in revenue as a sole employee running a fairly large active Web community (< 2500 Quantcast). The focus of the community is a niche market with very little competition but we fare well by providing good value to our community.
Our revenue sources breaks down as follows:
* 40/50K/month in subscription revenue
* 25K/month in adsense revenue
* 4k/month in other ad revenue (Ebay, Amazon, Viglink etc)
* 30K/month in license and royalty revenue
As the sole employee, my primary responsibilities are all of the development of the platform, all system administration, all marketing and business activities, financials, and I also provide all the primary user support for the site. We have approximately 120 administrators and moderators who are volunteers, and we also have 4 individuals who are independent contractors who receive a set amount every month to lead different parts of our site and lead those volunteers.
Our platform is primarily based on Amazon Web services but includes physical servers from other hosting platforms. Platform as a service providers that we use include Cloudkick, Chartbeat, Geckoboard, Dynect, and SendGrid.
The reason why we have been so successful is we cater to a hobbyist market and operate on a very generous freemium model. Our subscription revenue is solid and predictable, and we experience very few chargebacks because we have consciously decided not to do automated renewals. Our license and royalty revenue is due to licensing agreements we have with third parties who utilize our content and services and APIs, as well as mobile device makers who serve our content (primarily to the Android and iOS market).
All of the above is a full time job and I rarely ever have a day off, although I have a tremendous amount of flexibility with my schedule.