Captiva Maximus
What we do in life echoes in eternity!
Or at least in the long tail of Google-provided hits. I'm reliably informed by TTAC's back-end stats engine that 1,110 people took some time this week to read a review of the rental-only Chevrolet Captiva that first appeared in March of 2014. Another one hundred and forty-six people, probably a subset of the above thousand-something, read the Alex Dykes review of the 2012 Captiva as well.
By my rough guesstimate --- and I hasten to add that I have zero information about the actual numbers --- those two reviews paid TTAC's owners about seven dollars this week. Maybe ten, maybe five. Still, if those reviews continue to post decent "long-tail" numbers over the next year or so, it could end up being significant money. Maybe the lifetime earning potential of a Captiva review is $200, maybe it's $500, maybe it's $1000. You'd be surprised what kind of stuff picks up steam long after it's written. What's one of the blockbuster half-million-hit article worth to a site like Jalopnik? Five grand? More? Less? But the way Jalopnik really makes money isn't the blockbuster article; it's the fifty non-blockbusters that keep generating clicks long after the authors have been paid.
The magic of this business isn't the up-front numbers, which are pitiful by mainstream media standards. It's that people go back and look at the stuff for years as it becomes relevant to them. When someone becomes interested in the 2004 Mustang Bullitt, they might go to the library and look at an old issue of Car and Driver, which doesn't make any money for anyone. But more likely, they'll pull up the Car and Driver website and read it there, which puts a fraction of a penny in the Hearst Digital coffers. And you can ask anyone who has seen Superman III: those fractions add up.
What we write in life, echoes in the long tail.