Wired has an interesting article about Mario Lavandeira aka Perez Hilton, the celebrity gadfly blogger who operates PerezHilton.com, which he started in 2004 as "a fame-obsessed loner who had just been fired from a reporting job at Star magazine." His site gets millions of hits a day and he's been able to parlay that into a legitimate brand with "four-episode TV special, What Perez Sez (which aired on VH1 to respectable ratings), followed by a nationally syndicated on-air gossip gig with ABC Radio." This is in addition to his upcoming book as well as his own line of Tween clothing. I can't hate on this dude--his core and peripheral material obviously doesn't appeal to me, but I admire his ability to get paid. And man, does he get paid from scribbling childish barely legible observations on paparazzi photos of various celebrities on his website.
Ads on his homepage fetch up to $54,000 a day, and his overhead is minimal—his only employee is his sister Barby, who fields emails and corrects typos. Which means he's pulling down millions a year. The site now averages 198 million pageviews a month, according to the Web ratings service Quantcast.
Don't you sort of hate your life right now?
Read more here.
[Via]