Happy 1st Birthday Mobile Orchard

Today is Mobile Orchard’s birthday!

Like a father gushing about his kids, I’m going to share a little of the story of Mobile Orchard. I’ll also share some stats about the site, and talk about the challenges and opportunities of making a living blogging for a community of developers.

On October-1 of last year Apple dropped its notorious NDA. Eight days later, Peter Cooper (of Ruby Inside fame) and I launched the site.

Peter and I had already been talking about creating an iPhone site but, of course, the NDA made a mess of things. In a way, though, the NDA helped: it created an situation where hundreds of thousands of developers wanted iPhone dev content but couldn’t have it. When Apple finally dropped it, there was a ready made audience. We just needed to get it.

Peter set to work on getting the site setup and seeded with content and I started working on a name:

Apple’s position on the use of the iPhone trademark was unclear, so we steered clear of iPhone names. I wrote a piece of software atop Princeton’s WordNet project that let me pick words and see related words. I spent many hours starting at variations of phone, mobile, handy, apple, tree, etc. I may have lost lucidity brief because I actually considered Phoneloper — from phone developers! Eventually, frustratedly, I said to my wife, “Well, it’s about Apple’s mobile phone. Apple’s are grown in orchards. How about Mobile Orchard?”

Early Attention Getting Content

After announcing the site on Peter’s fabulously popular Ruby Inside site, we started looking for magnets to attract an audience.

There was, and is, a lot of Ruby-to-iPhone interest, including two prominent success stories from well known Rubyists: Hampton Catlin had created the iWik, first App Store success, and Dr. Nic Williams was getting ready to launch an iPhone app for Oakley. Nic and Hampton are friends, so I interviewed them for the podcast. I also interviewed my friend, former business partner, godfather to my children and — relevantly — creator of the Pandora iPhone App Neil Mix. These three interviews generated tens of thousands of impressions.

I’d managed to get my hands on a pre-release Android phone. iPhone devs were, naturally, curious about the G1, so I produced a 5 Minute Video Walkthrough Of Android For iPhone Developers.

Strapping an iPhone to a rocket and using the phone’s GPS and accelerometer to push telemetry to a web server in-flight is just about the nerd rapture. Accordingly, our interview, video, data from Michael Koppelman‘s iPhone Rocket was widely reported on.

Fortune/CNN, TUAW, Daring Fireball, O’Reilly

The item that — in the early days — got us noticed the most was, without question, our piece titled 99 Cent iPhone Apps Not Significantly More Popular.

It’s funny to talk about the old days in an industry that’s less than two years old, but: this was the era when everyone was worried about ringtone pricing. We’d been working with App Store XML data sniffed from iTunes for an unrelated project when we noticed that, on a category by category basis, you could plot the popularity of an app and its price. The data showed that, contrary to the conventional wisdom of the day, you could charge more than a buck. Our piece on this was picked up all over the place, including Fortune/CNN, TUAW, Daring Fireball and O’Reilly. This really put Mobile Orchard on the map.

A Year’s Stats

In one year we’ve published 207 posts — that’s a post four out of five business days — that have garnered 1,226 comments. We’ve written 39 tutorials, at basically a day each. We’ve published 25 podcasts, also a day each. We’ve released one screencast; it was downloaded over 1,700 times in its first week.

Including feed readership, we generate around 200,000 impressions/month. Our regular readership — people who subscribe to the feed or follow us on twitter — is over 7,500. We’re the number one search result for iPhone developer news and iPhone developer podcast. Podcast listenership ranges from 5,000 to 15,000 depending on the topic.

The Business Of Mobile Orchard

I work Mobile Orchard full time. Earning a living as a blogger is hard.

The sponsors, to whom I am grateful, essentially cover the hosting and bandwidth.

The money, primarily, comes from teaching iPhone programming classes. A full class taught once a month provides enough income that I can write for the site during the rest of the month. If I can continue to fill the classes than I can continue to bring you Mobile Orchard.

Help me out by cajoling someone to sign up for my November Beginning iPhone Programming Workshops in Portland/OR and Los Angeles/CA.

Thanks

I’ll wrap things up by thanking some folks:

I’m grateful to Peter Cooper. The site wouldn’t exist without him. Peter had too many other obligations and had to step aside in the spring; we remain mates.

Peter’s departure meant we didn’t have a news reporter. Ari Braginsky stepped in and his weekly This Week in iPhone News column has become required reading.

Noel Llopis is our goto guy for all things OpenGL and gaming related. His amazing iPhone OpenGL helps finance the site.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed content, including Aaron Kardell, Brian Akaka, Brian Stormont, Clint Harris, Doug Barth, Jeff LaMarche, Jim Bernard, Kailoa Kadano, Neil Mix, Owen Goss, Paul Cantrell, Peter Bakhyryev, Rob Terrell, Ryan Daigle, and Stephen Lombardo,

Thanks to everyone whose taken our iPhone programming classes.

And thank you for reading.