Apropos of Andrew Sullivan’s latest pledge drive to pay for increased bandwidth expenses, Wunderkinder wonders why Sullivan’s bandwith is so darn expensive. In an earlier post, Wunderkinder wrote:

Even if you estimate Andrew Sullivan’s homepage at 40KB (generous considering the lack of graphics), and you estimate his monthly visitors at 3,000,000 (generous considering I think he posted special when he got over 100,000 for one day), this still only generates 120GB of bandwidth he needs per month. Well, you can easily buy 10 GB of hard drive room, and 200 GB of data transfer, for about $500 a year.

By comparison, Sullivan raised somewhere around $120,000 from his readers last summer. A previous pledge drive raised $79,020.

Sounds like someone’s getting ripped off.

In other news, Sullivan has used his bandwidth for a windy endorsement of John Kerry as “the conservative choice – for a difficult and perilous time.” Powerline responds:

It has been obvious for the past year that he has been preparing to endorse the Democratic nominee, whoever he may be. Andrew may or may not be fooling himself when he paints a pro-security veneer on his support for John Kerry, but he isn’t fooling anyone else.

True dat.

Update: Ace of Spades HQ has launched a pledge drive too:

Please send me money to cover the rising costs of my cutting-edge, top-of-the-line commenting interface.

I need thirty three million dollars.

Update II: In the Comments section, Sky King asks, “Is Sullivan pulling a slow-motion David Brock move?”

Update III: John Hawkins questions whether Sullivan is telling the truth about his traffic statistics:

From Andrew Sullivan’s statistics tracker, here are his unique visitors over the last few months (Jan appeared to be an incomplete starting month)…

Feb: 1410869
Mar: 1250342
Apr: 1205536
May: 1233008
Jun: 1103882
Jul: 833502

Traffic is down 300,000 sets of eyeballs from Feb to Jun and it looks like July is on pace to be a new low unless Sully gets a flurry of last minute readers.

comments (69)   trackbacks (38)