Joe Kissell

A few days ago I was talking to my mother on the phone, and I mentioned that Morgen has a new blog, Spectatrix, about life as an introvert. In the process of explaining what the blog was about, I mentioned in passing something about my being an introvert too, and my mother was incredulous. “You? An introvert? You’ve got to be kidding! I mean, I knew I was an introvert, but you?” Well, I was shocked that she was shocked. But on further reflection, I think we were working from very different definitions of what it means to be an introvert, and I can see how easily someone (even someone who’s known me my whole life) might therefore make that mistake.

If you’ve ever taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, you know that the first personality component it produces is I for introvert or E for extrovert. (I’m an INTJ, in case you were wondering.) The sense of “introvert/extrovert” measured by this test is a specific psychological definition. As the Wikipedia puts it, where one falls on the “I/E” axis

show how a person orients and receives their energy. In the extroverted attitude the energy flow is outward, and the preferred focus is on other people and things, whereas in the introverted attitude the energy flow is inward, and the preferred focus is on one’s own thoughts, ideas and impressions.

In other words, extroverts get more energy from being around other people, whereas introverts get more energy from being alone, and find that being around others tends to drain their energy. This is very different from the colloquial sense of “introvert” as someone who’s shy, timid, withdrawn, or even misanthropic. I’m none of those things, and in fact I love speaking in front of crowds and throwing parties. But I have to do these things in moderation, and on my own terms. Given the choice, I’d almost always rather be with fewer people than with many, and I’d be happier still to be alone. Of course, it makes a lot of difference who the other people are and what they’re doing. If there’s a lot of noise involved, or if people are crowded close around me, that’s not so good, but if the crowd is more spread out and quieter, then my tolerance goes up; it goes up even more if the people are friends rather than strangers.

From what we’ve read, it sounds like Morgen and I are fairly typical introverts (although she’s further toward the “I” side of the scale than I am), and what she’s written on Spectatrix certainly rings true for me. Introverts tend to have a lower tolerance for noise and a greater need for personal space than extroverts, but there’s certainly a lot of variation. So although I might chalk up some personality trait as being “because” I’m an introvert, there could be other reasons—and it may not be true for other introverts, or true to a different degree.

A few people have expressed confusion at the notion of an introvert running a blog, as though by definition we should be very private people who want to avoid attention of any kind. I guess Morgen and I are pretty private people, but the great thing about the Web is that it lets us share information about ourselves with lots of people in a way that doesn’t drain our energy, since we’re not interacting with everyone at once, or in person. I’ve corresponded with I can’t tell you how many thousands of people who have read one of my books, articles, or Web posts, and because the interactions are all done from the privacy of my office, by typing rather than talking, it’s always felt completely neutral in terms of draining my energy. Again, that may not be true of all introverts, but I think many people would be surprised how many actors, singers, politicians, and even high-profile bloggers would identify themselves as introverts.

As I discussed in The Fourth Anniversary of ITotD, Interesting Thing of the Day turned 4 on Sunday. That must be 28 in blog years, but then, when I started the site I had no idea I was becoming a blogger. (I still sort of don’t believe that, but the fact that I’m making that claim here, on yet another blog, suggests that I’m just in denial.)

I know of professional bloggers who do nothing but crank out posts all day long, sometimes by the dozens, on several different blogs. Some of them even make a handsome living doing so. For me, though, quality has always been much more important than quantity. I can type as many words per day as they next guy, but the actual writing isn’t where I spend the bulk of my time. Regardless of the subject matter I’m dealing with, I typically spend about half my time doing research, a quarter of my time writing, and another quarter editing and rewriting. The majority of what I read on the Web was written with very little research and even less editing. And I understand that this approach works well for a lot of people—writers and readers alike. It’s just not my thing. Maybe I’m too old-school, and maybe it’s not the path to rapid riches, but I prefer to take my time.

Because of these predilections, and because Interesting Thing of the Day has steadfastly resisted categorization, it didn’t go quite according to my initial plan. But four years later, it’s starting to get there.

A (Not-So-) Brief History of Interesting Thing of the Day My very first article for Interesting Thing of the Day¹ was full of optimism about how I’d found my true calling as a Curator of Interesting Things, how I intended to make a full-time job out of writing these articles, and how I wasn’t particularly concerned about the site’s ability to make money. Looking back now, I don’t know how I thought I could produce a new article of up to 1,500 words every single day (weekends and holidays included), or how I imagined that without any ads or overt selling, the site could make enough money for me to live on. For more than seven solid months I did pull off the article-every-day feat (with the help of a few articles from guest authors). The site had attracted a small but loyal group of regular readers, but it also made barely any money—and after all that work with so little reward, I was completely burned out. I decided to go on a hiatus, during which time I focused on my technical writing, which at least paid the bills reliably.

Version 2.0: A couple of months into my recuperation, I heard about this groovy new thing called Google AdSense. I figured I had nothing to lose by putting the code on the site to display contextual ads, so I did. Much to my amazement, all those articles that had just been sitting there on the site for months suddenly started making money. Not a lot, at first, but enough to make me think there might be something to this whole enterprise after all. So I retooled the site, committing myself to another year of daily articles—some of which were recycled and updated versions of those from the first run, and the rest of which were new. I also jumped on the podcast bandwagon, producing audio recordings of every article, and began offering paid subscriptions that entitled readers to get, among other things, the full text of each daily article by email.

That year, from June 2004 to May 2005, was more difficult than I’d expected. Readership increased, and a nontrivial number of people purchased subscriptions. Since I was writing fewer new articles than I had during that first stretch, the work was a bit less grueling. But by the end of that year, I realized I couldn’t afford to be spending so much of my time—often 30–40 hours per week—doing something that wasn’t contributing meaningfully to paying the rent. I decided to take more time off, with the intention of giving the site a complete makeover and coming up with ways to make it less labor-intensive. In the meantime, I again ran articles from the archives, but in a change from my previous schedule, skipped weekends and holidays. I thought that break might last a few months, but it stretched to an entire year.

Version 3.0: In May 2006, Interesting Thing of the Day had its second grand re-opening. We had a new logo and a completely redesigned site. I changed lots of features in an attempt to make the site more modern, efficient, and user-friendly. And I announced that I was adopting a burnout-resistant schedule: new articles would appear, on average, about twice a week, but with no particular guarantees; recycled articles would fill in some of the off days to keep the content reasonably dynamic. I can’t tell you how much I struggled with that decision, because it meant that Interesting Thing of the Day was no longer literally of-the-day, something I’d considered of central importance from the beginning. But I felt it was the only way I could potentially keep the site going indefinitely.

And now, even the site’s income is finally beginning to think about edging into a somewhat interesting region. By “interesting,” I mean that I can now conceive of the possibility that, if current trends continue, I might actually be able to make Interesting Thing of the Day my full-time job after all in a year or two. Working on nothing but ITotD was what I envisioned when we started on April 1, 2003, and at the time, I thought it might take about six months. So maybe it takes six years instead. But I can just start to see the faint suggestion of a dim light at the distant end of a long tunnel. (I hope that’s enough qualifiers!) To help the process along, I’m officially asking for donations. Perhaps I’ll even turn it into an annual membership drive, à la PBS or Daring Fireball. But we’ll see what happens.

Famous for Being Famous If I’ve learned one lesson from Interesting Thing of the Day in the last year, it’s that popularity is self-reinforcing. That should have been obvious, but it seems that the site had to very slowly work its way up to a certain threshold, a certain reasonably high number of readers, before the rate of popularity began to increase significantly. Today, in addition to all those FeedBurner readers, the site is getting vastly more “ordinary” visitors than it did a year ago, and the number is trending ever more sharply upward. The site is essentially the same as it always was, but more people knowing about it led to more people knowing about it, and all of a sudden lots and lots of people know about it.

I started out thinking, naively, that all I had to do was to build a quality site and the word would spread like wildfire. What I really had to do was build a quality site, wait for several years, redesign it a few times, and experience a bit of luck. But sure enough, it’s finally getting getting close to what I envisioned all those years ago.

¹That article is no longer online, I’m afraid; it got recycled during one of the site’s overhauls. Just as well: it’s a bit embarrassing to read nowadays.

For some time now, Interesting Thing of the Day has used FeedBurner for its free, public RSS feeds. (Since we authenticate paid subscribers individually with usernames and passwords, they use a different URL that we serve directly.) Among its many excellent features, FeedBurner helpfully reports how many readers your feed has, but I never paid close attention to those figures because they always seemed to hover around 1,000–1,200. Then one day, about a month ago, the number suddenly jumped to over 83,000! That was the day FeedBurner began reporting how many people were reading feeds via Google Reader and the Google Personalized Homepage; previously Google hadn’t made those statistics available.

I assumed the new Google Reader stats would indicate some small increase, but I was completely unprepared for the jump of nearly two orders of magnitude. (Of course, it wasn’t really an immediate jump, it was simply an immediate clarification in the reporting of people who were already readers.) And in the last month, that number has continued to grow steadily. As I write this, the figure is 98,053 99,007, and I’m sure it’ll cross the 100k mark in a day or two.

A full 99% of those 98,000+ readers are coming through Google Reader, while other subscribers have barely increased at all. I have no explanation for the site’s seemingly over-the-top popularity for Google Reader users. I am utterly astonished that Interesting Thing of the Day could be among the top 10 most popular RSS feeds, if this post at franticindustries is correct (they currently have us at #4—wow).

Being a good capitalist, one of my first thoughts on learning this news was that I should figure out how I can leverage all those extra pairs of eyes to make more money. On average, the Web version of ITotD has been getting just shy of 7,000 visits per day recently. A certain percentage of those visitors click on ads, and that’s what generates the majority of the site’s income. Although the RSS feed contains ads too, they produce far less income than those on the site. So I thought: I should stop including the full text of each article in the feeds, because that gives readers no reason at all to click through to the site, where the higher-value ads are.

Thus, a couple of weeks ago, I changed the free feeds from full text to excerpts, and also removed the podcasts. Full text and podcasts are still available in the paid feeds, for which there’s an ad in the free feeds. I assumed this move would have one or more of the following effects:

• More people would click through from the excerpts to read the full articles
• We’d lose some subscribers from the free feeds because they were irritated at having to click through
• We’d get more paid subscribers to the full feeds

In fact, none of that happened. Since the change, the average number of page views on the site has remained steady. The numbers of subscribers to the free feeds has continued its climb. Exactly one person complained about the change, and his complaint was essentially that the free feeds contained too long of an excerpt! And we’ve had only two new paid subscribers, which I can’t attribute to the change.

I truly don’t know how it is that nearly 100,000 people are seemingly very interested in reading the first two paragraphs of every ITotD article, but not at all interested in the rest. Not that I mind the exposure, but it’s weird. So I’m thinking about decreasing the excerpt to one paragraph and seeing what happens. If I get no results, I’ll scale it back further to just the synopsis—which is what it used to be, way back when. And if even that neither increases the number of click-throughs nor decreases the number of feed subscribers, I’ll be completely baffled.

But perhaps I’m missing something obvious. It wouldn’t be the first time! If you have any theories or wisdom to share, please do so in the comments.