This is very un-Nick Denton of me to write, but fuck it, I'm not that guy and there's no way to be vague about the problem I will try to address here. Here's some reality living the blogging dream shit for those of you that care about these sort of internet dramas:

Today we were lucky to get a ton of positive press attention from a business digest that selected Destructoid as the 16th most valuable blog on the internet. Destructoid was founded on the 16th day of March so I thought that was some cosmic and divine message from the heavens that we will be worth that someday. I won't lie to you -- we nearly fell off our chairs when we saw the list. It's nice to be thought so highly of.

After we were done spooging and humping our computers we actually read the article, which of course, was full of holes. Funny enough our traffic was lower than projected but our earnings were super inflated. I said I wouldn't correct them until we enjoyed the press, and it didn't prevent me from printing it and hanging it on our lobby (and forwarding it to my dad, who laughed).

Unfortunately press like this also brought about some Cashwhore drama on their site, then ours. People actually believe this shit despite 30 comments pointing out how flawed the article was in the actual post. Whats worse is that some people close to us think I'm swimming in a pile of money secretly: More than a handful community members decided it would be a good idea to call me out over some non-credible source they've never seen before. Blows my mind.

At first I got really upset over it at first but in the end its just downright heartbreaking to hear this shit from people you thought you knew and knew you. Mo Money Mo Problems is fine, but this is Mo Theoretically Rumored Money Mo Problems. WTF. I was tempted to scan my bank account to get people off my back but instead just took a photo of some overdraft notices I had on my desk. Just so happened we moved last month and checks get lost/rerouted in the mail. It's all good, we're still paying the bills. But it just goes to show; we're not exactly sitting on gold bars.

Anyway, here's why the article was way, way, way off.

Yes, Federated Media sells ads for Dtoid at a $9 CPM. That's a list price: advertisers negotiate down from that and our ad guys earn a commission for a job well done. The industry average for ad networks is half. (So that's already half of our million dollars right there). Next up: Who the hell has an independent company with no sales team and sells 100% of their premium inventory? We'd be lucky to sell a fifth of it in this economy and hope to make it up in Q4. The rest you fill up with punch-the-monkey-ads and Google Adsense, and you know how much that pays: 10-50 cents ... and you pay the network half for their job well done. How many Bentleys can you get with that while paying five servers, international airfare, and an editorial team? None.

The lesson here: A blog is worth what somebody is willing to pay for it, not because some math nerd thinks your site is worth X because of some transaction that AOL did five years ago and what Alexa (the least reliable analytics system ever) thinks. These people are making their money serving ads around their calculator. The joke's on you, the reader.

There's a Morrissey song whose chorus is "your friends hate it when you're successful", and that's what this reminds me of. I wouldn't be driving a used Volkswagen Golf (which I love) and renting a nice apartment downtown that also doubles our office (which I can afford because I just sold my house!) if Dtoid was indeed making $800k a year. Ridiculous. We would have such a big ass office in downtown San Francisco and a bunch of editors in the same building and I'd have a web development department building all the software we need. We'd be scaring the fuck out of IGN and Cnet. Duh, people! Another day, another internet drama. Such is the life of a web site publisher. Move along folks, nothing here to see.

Nevertheless, it does underscore the Mo Money Mo Problems wisdom. We're all busting ass so that we will see that kind of money someday. It's a goal we're all working hard towards and we will achieve it if we want Dtoid to be successful bad enough, and we do. When we get there I hope you'll be happy for us, as well as hold us to a higher standard to produce a better web site. We gonna bring it it.

I shared the article earlier today with the editors from our three sites and and, after a few funny emails, I think we were all on the same page. Destructoid is not worth 2.5 million dollars. It's priceless. We can't think of anything else we'd rather be doing. Banksy, the famous graffiti artist, said this about fame and success: You don't go into a nice restaurant thinking about the epic shit you're going to have afterwards.