Icon O’Clock was a daily blog about free icons sets, mostly inspired by Cute Overload and my love of icons. I wrote and ran a few weeks of posts and stopped because:
- I write really slowly, it took me 30-90 minutes each
- I do graphics slowly, it took me 30-90 minutes each
- Finding decent icons was painfully tedious, 15-45 minutes each
On top of the giant time sink, it’s really hard for a site to make any money by aggregating free content. All I can do is paste some ads around and their quality and relevance was uniformly low.
So I was doing lots of things I was bad at and not succeeding in attracting attention or revenue. At least I had the sense to kill this one young.
I could imagine restarting the site with a copywriter, a program to put together the icon set images, and user submissions of icons… but I still can’t see any way for it to earn back the time and money that’d take.
