Apple's biggest Aussie fan looks for $125k golden parachute

白雲山民

Apple's biggest Aussie fan looks for $125k golden parachute
Ben Grubb
February 24, 2011 - 10:41AM

MacTalk founder Anthony Agius.
The founder of the popular Australian Apple fan site MacTalk, Anthony Agius, says running it is getting "boring" so he's putting the site up for online auction with a minimum bid of $125,000.

Melbourne-based Agius, 26, has been running the online Apple shrine for just over six years now, three of which have been on a full-time basis. But now he's looking to move on from the site so many Apple fans flock to on a daily basis.

"When I wake up in the morning I tend to ask myself 'Do I still care?'," he said in a telephone interview.

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"In the past I was like 'Apple is awesome' and I wanted to share that passion with people."

But now he just wanted to "enjoy Apple on my own".

Apple was like a religion for many, he added. "You could easily make a way of life around Apple. People I know do and it's kind of creepy."

Asked if selling the site meant he had lost faith in the company the site was built to worship, he said he hadn't. It was more the fact that there were "many" other sites on the web doing the same thing as MacTalk - and doing it better. He had just lost the motivation to continue, he said, and selling it wouldn't mean he was any "less of a fan boy".

"Apple themselves have never been more fascinating."

The $125,000 figure came from calculating what he would need if he didn't work for three years.

But what does he plan to do next? That, he said, he was unsure of. But if his personal blog [explicit language] is anything to go by, it might include spending "the entire time on the couch playing video games and eating pizza".

Another option was to "drive around the USA, Stephen Fry-style. I might even create some other sort of site".

He said one of the most memorable things he had done in the past six years whilst running MacTalk was going to New York with his friend Peter Wells and bringing back 19 iPads for a bunch of the forum's users, before it was available in Australia.

What Agius will miss the most, he said, was the "vast range and variety of people I've met that share the same interest as me", which was "an amazing benefit of being involved in something like MacTalk".

"I will miss that and it will be hard to get that sort of experience again."

By rough calculations, Agius has waited in line at an Apple store on 10 occasions, including Apple store grand openings.

The site makes an estimated $6046 profit a month, according to its listing on auction site flippa.com.

It makes money via a variety of methods, some of which include displaying advertising on the site using Google AdSense, having a blog post sponsored by a company or referring a sale of an Apple product.

It also makes money like a traditional online media outlet would through in-house display advertising.

Between August 2010 and January 2011 there was an average of 492,574 absolute unique visitors per month, the auction listing said. There were 1,463,443 page views per month in the same period and 52 per cent of traffic came from Australia whilst 25 per cent came from the US.

Agius co-founded the site with Matthew Kelsh when it launched in January 2004. Agius then later decided to commercialise the site, which was when Kelsh no longer wanted any involvement with it.

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