I think you mean "greater than zero".
Well, atrios and kos make enough to have a good salary, let's say ~100k. So I'd guess Drudge would be around $400k since he's been around longer and has way more hits.
The net worth thing is interesting- in the past (>100 years ago), you could always reset your net worth to zero by just disappearing. There was a cost involved in losing personal connections, which is why people only did it when they were deeply in debt, but I'd imagine it happened fairly often. It's an odd feature of modern life that you can't just walk away any more.
Hot dog!
That's lowballing it a bit, don't you think?
You wouldn't say that if you'd seen it.
I think you mean "greater than zero".
No, with the medical bills and whatnot, I think it's going to hover at zero for a while.
I suck. I wasn't counting his radio program, though. I also happen to like living in the year 2000.
I was also going to guess about a million dollars, though I can't remember the blog that I was basing that guess off of.
Oh yeah, forgot about the medical bills. Bad luck that -- shoulda lived in a country with universal coverage.
You wouldn't say that if you'd seen it.
I admit, it's a nice ballpark figure.
Surely ogged is insured, because if he weren't, he'd be in the poorhouse.
Yes, I'm insured. It's hard to imagine how fucked I would have been if I weren't. Dead, I suppose.
I know someone who had recently started a new job when he had something very bad happen in his brain necessitating multiple emergency brain surgeries, the removal (and evental replacement) of a piece of his skull (kept warm in his belly until they could put it back, no lie), a whole bunch of recovery, etc. His employers backdated his insurance application, fortunately; otherwise he would either be dead or millions in the hole right now.
Salaries are weird things. I recently came to the rather odd realization that graduating from college will involve a decently large pay cut for me, if I still want to do the whole NGA/public policy-ish thing in DC. Years of education and intellectual effort are apparently given a strong run for their money by knowing how to drive a forklift.
Atrios has denied in the past, way back when I was reading him, making even near 100K a year on ads. Anyway, I want to, in the correct spirit of things, make a reasonable guess so that Ogged can feel happy when he throws out the correct, jaw-dropping number, so I'll say $80k.
I bet the number will be jaw-droppingly small. Atrios has a salary from Media Matters, and he's still not living that large.
I bet Reynolds is the guy who's most well-off: his day job lets him blog a ton, so his ad rates are ok, and he's got the book plus some small-time TV appearances.
Ogged's taking so long on this, I had to go and look it up.
Michael, you baby, I'll put up the answer at the end of the day.
More than he should, is my answer. But that's just sour grapes on my part; even my piddly blog ads and t-shirt attempts to generate *some* income of my own next year require frustrating time managing them. I'm so lame at the business crap. No wonder my net worth is probably still a negative number.
Re. 15, my boyfriend's employer did the same when he broke his neck and needed neurosurgery. Boy, we live in a screwed-up country.
15, 22- Is that legal? My company agreed to hire me to start five days before my wife was due, but I really did work there for a week before sending their insurance company thousands in bills.
I'm sure they all rake in incredible sums from Amazon. Every time Doctorow pimps a book on Amazon, he rakes in 4%. I make about $70 Amazon dollars a month from between 300-500 daily readers, so I can only imagine what Doctorow and his ilk pull in...so in terms of Amazon cash, I guarantee they make more than $820 per year. Multiply that by actual ads and we're in, um, math territory.
23: There's a reason it's called the w-lfs-n Indiscretion Error.
SCMT, I'll have you know that I could have been a lot more identifying.
More than the gross domestic product of Honduras?
A year's supply of ridiculous white fedoras.
a year's supply
How fast does one go through hats?
Exactly. He casts them aside when they are done, soiled by the sweat of a day's honest muckracking. They must gleam.
Just like socks
He sleeps in them?
Yes. His sleepwear consists solely of socks and a fedora.
On what part of his body does he wear the fedora?
On what part of his body does he wear the fedora?
This is getting very intrusive. Surely Matt Drudge has earned the right to a little respect for his privacy.
23: No, it's fraud. But it's still morally right.
More than the gross domestic product of Honduras?
Drudge Report runs 14M impressions a day. All he would need is 60 advertisers paying $1,000/week. I know of much, much smaller publications that service upwards of 20 advertisers at an average of $500/week. I know of advertisers who pay $1000/week for considerably fewer impressions (though admittedly from a more finely targetted audience).
Could be wrong, but my sense is he's making a shitload.
If anyone really wants to know before Ogged enlightens us, there are rough numbers (a couple years old) on his wikipedia entry. This is how I knew my number was so so wrong.
That's my source too, SP. Thanks for ruining the game for everybody! I was going to give out prizes!
But those numbers are 2-3 years old- do we have any idea of the current number? I'm also curious if he was making more at the height of the internet boom and before there were other "instant news" type sites.
Were the prizes white fedoras?
it's fraud. But it's still morally right.
I wouldn't say it's morally right. It's not unambiguously wrong, but the whole concept of insurance pretty much falls apart if people only sign up for it when they know they need medical care. It's one of the reasons why univesal health insurance is good--everyone, the sick and the well, gets lumped into the same risk pool.
But these aren't cases where people say, "Oops, I'm sick, better go buy insurance"; they were uninsured because they'd just started new jobs. Of course the point about universal insurance stands; one of the horrible things about our system is that it makes people do this kind of thing. (Another horrible thing is that if you don't have insurance you go bankrupt or DIE or both.)
I just got the EOB from my insurance company for the medical centre's bill for my out-patient ankle surgery. Not the bill for the surgeon or the anęsthesiologist or the assisting surgeon, just the medical centre. Where I spent approximately 3 hours. And had a tuna sandwich.
Just guess what that bill was.
43: but now you can just give the prizes to the people who ask for them. I'd like the pony, please.
Hilary Putnam is male? How disappointing.
$30,044.07
I figure the $44.07 was for the sandwich.
From his wikipedia article, copied tonight:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Drudge
"During an April 30, 2004 appearance on C-SPAN, Drudge confirmed that he has broken the seven-figure mark. 'I could buy unfogged.com a million times over,' the gossip remarked, leading the obscure site's founder, ogged, to spend a week wearing a white fedora to see if he could channel more business savvy.
Now who did that? Hee hee hee hee!
I got the screenshot, and now I'm feeling a little bad about making wikipedia look foolish. Might whoever is responsible for the (totally awesome and very funny) edit change it back, please?
It appears to be the only edit that user(name) has ever made.
I switched it back. Here is the old version.
Who needs a screenshot? It's there in the edits, presumably forever.
I didn't actually make the joke. I just switched it back. I also foolishly failed to make a libelous statement as a comment to the change history. I am humor deprived.
OK, I fess. I just checked to see how long before it was switched back - four hours is pretty long by wikipedia standards. Think it made it into any 7th grade current affairs reports?