Accidental Tech Entrepreneurs Turn Their Hobbies Into Livelihoods, by Mitch Wagner

Interesting article on “five accidental entrepreneurs” (Mena and Ben count as one, naturally).

Dooce gets 45,000 to 65,000 unique visitors on weekdays, about half that on weekend days. Their hosting provider is Liquid Web; they pay $200 per month for the server access and bandwidth. Dooce gets its ads from two sources: Federated Media for the Web site, and Pheedo for ads in the site’s RSS feed. The two networks supply sales help and serving technology, and set ad rates.

Kevin Rose launched Digg on a $99-per-month server and built it on open source software–the basic Lamp architecture: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. He put up $700 for development costs, plus $99 per month for Web hosting. It generates sales from Google ads and recently entered into a partnership with Federated Media for ad sales.

- via TraderMike -