Normalkid:Arnold Kim

Yesterday was my last day at my full time job as a physician. I plan to work on MacRumors.com and other web projects full time.

The most likely reaction I expect from regular MacRumors readers is “You weren’t working on MacRumors full time already?”

As crazy as it seems, for these past 8 years, MacRumors has been a hobby or part-time job. I think most people would have made this move long before me, but the momentum of my “other” career made it difficult for me to break free.

I started MacRumors.com in February of 2000. I was in my 4th and last year of medical school. I had been dabbling in the web for fun and decided to focus a natural interest of mine (Apple) into a website. My work on the site has since had its ups and downs. Over the next 8 years, I completed medical school, an Internal Medicine residency, a fellowship in Nephrology and even worked two years in private practice as a physician (Nephrologist).

During that time, I’ve been fortunate enough that my hobby has become successful enough that I am able to transition it into my career. While the trend may have been clear for past couple of years, I was slow to recognize it.

One of the most frustrating things over the years, however, has been my inability to dedicate the proper time to improve MacRumors as I might have wanted. In addition, as a web-tech-guy I constantly have ideas and plans for other web projects that I’ve never had the time to pursue. By settling on this as my career, I will be able to execute some long standing plans.

Wish me luck!

Follow Me

Twitter: http://twitter.com/arnoldkim
RSS Feed: http://normalkid.com/feed/

My Active Sites

Normalkid - my personal blog
MacRumors.com - Mac news and rumors
TouchArcade.com - iPhone games

Contact Me

arn@normalkid.com

Once upon a time, I was actually a non-web programmer.

I had an interest in game development and the demoscene. This was mostly done at the hobby level. I did write one screen saver module for After Dark 4.0 (’Points of View’ was mine).

I wrote a few graphical demos in C and 68000 assembly back in my college days on a Mac IIsi. I spent a lot of my free time on these demos during one summer. The big problem now is that they were written under Mac OS 9 Mac OS 7-9 on 680×0 processor machines, and I believe they specifically targeted 256 color displays.

I was hoping that someone out there would have a Mac that could actually run these old apps, and be able to record them as digital videos. I would love to have video copies of these since I’m unlikely to be able to run them in the future. Here are the download links:

Chrystar Demo
Flag Day
Chaosmint

If anyone could actually do this, I’d greatly appreciate it. You can contact me via the Forums contact form. Thanks.

The secret to success on the internet can be boiled down to one simple accomplishment: building traffic.

That’s it. If you have a site that attracts a lot of visitors, you will be able to make money. On the internet, traffic equals power, which subsequently equals money.

Depending on the topic of your site, however, it may be easier and harder to generate that money. But even a seemingly ridiculous site such as HotorNot.com has a revenue of $5-$10 million a year (with the bulk of it being profit). If you aren’t familiar with the site, the premise is simple: rate other users on how “hot” they are on a scale of 1 to 10. That’s it. You vote, and get sent to the next photo. When I first saw it, I thought it was amusing but saw no way they could make money from it. As it turns out, they managed to turn it into a casual dating site with a simple subscription service that allowed you to make connections. This simple $6/month revenue stream added up to a revenue stream of up to $10 million a year,

Now, generating revenue might not be enough if your expenses are high. One notable site that has never made a profit is YouTube. To be fair, I don’t think generating a steady profit was part of the original game plan. As a venture capital funded site, millions of dollars were invested in the infrastructure, employees and bandwidth to create what became a “killer app” for the Internet. In the end, the founders and investors did make an enormous profit on the site through its sale to Google for $1.6 billion dollars. Why did Google pay $1.6 billion to buy a site that has never made a profit? Because Google understands more than anyone the value of traffic, and truly believes that traffic = power = money.

As the founder of a well trafficked site, and with plans to establish other sites, the concept of building traffic is always on my mind. I have ideas of how other sites established their user base, but here are a few reasons MacRumors has grown to be as popular as it has:

- Good domain - I was fortunate to be able to pick up “MacRumors.com” as an expired domain in 2000. It’s a generic keyword-rich domain which perfectly encapsulates the topic of the site. It’s easy to remember, and well ranked in searches related to rumors.

- Addictive Content - it’s no coincidence that I started a web site surrounding rumors about Apple and the Mac. I was already an addict. I scoured messageboards and news sites around the web for hints about future Apple products. I don’t expect everyone to understand how this particular topic is as addictive as it is… but clearly it’s not just me.

- Little Competition - We weren’t the first rumor site on the scene. But what was interesting was that there used to be a clear divide between rumor sites and news sites in the Mac web. “News sites” would not report on rumors. They purposefully ignored the entire subcommunity. That seems ridiculous now, as the lines have since blurred, with even mainstream media covering Apple rumors. But I’d say that gave us a 4 year head start over other Mac sites. They weren’t willing to cater to the rumor-audience, so MacRumors was one of only a few rumor destinations for those intervening years.

I’ve owned an Apple computer since the age of 12 or so. My first Apple was an Apple //c. I later moved on to the Apple //gs, a Mac IIsi, PowerMac 7500 and so on. I’m presently on a Mac Pro Quad Xeon.

During those 20 or so years, one thing has remained pretty constant… Apple has had very little interest in encouraging game development on their platforms. I can’t find any original references, but there’s an underlying belief that Steve Jobs hates games. Whether or not that’s true… that’s how Apple has acted over the years. Even to my then teenage mind, it seemed crazy that Apple would actively discourage such a popular use of their computers.

All that may have changed with the introduction of the iPhone and iPod Touch SDK. At the launch event, Apple invited Electronic Arts and SEGA to demonstrate their latest games running on the iPhone and iPod Touch… could it be that Apple has finally changed their attitude?

It seems so… but even without Apple’s blessing, I believe the iPhone and iPod Touch will become a huge gaming platform. The potential market is just too large and the desire for casual gaming on your mobile phone is just too great. By the end of 2008, Apple expects to have seeded at least 10 million iPhones to the world.

Everyone finds themselves in situations where they are just killing time and all they have is their mobile phone. Text messaging, browsing the web, and playing the latest iPhone game are the activities that people will increasingly turn to.

Based on this belief, Blake Patterson and I have launched a new site catering to those interested in gaming on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

We’ve been filling out content and formatting over the past few weeks. News stories will obviously pick up after the official launch of the iPhone SDK in June, so we have just been ramping it up in the meanwhile. I can’t be certain what the future holds, but I believe this site addresses a very loyal and expanding topic of interest.