Dear Nuffnangers

The invention of sophisticated electronic gadgets, especially the technology-wonder mobile notebook/portable desktop, and the advent of WiFi and now WiMax, have never made blogging any easier. Anybody, regardless of age, gender, race, or ethnicity, could tramp across the globe with a notebook in their hands, and they would be able to blog about anything they wish to without having much difficulty.

The availability of sites such as Blogger.com and Wordpress.com, have allowed people to simply create a blogging website within seconds. On top of that, Blogger websites have showed progressive improvement in their blogging systems that it had simplified the process of publishing posts into just a few clicks away. With blogging made efficient and easy, it’s no wonder that the number of bloggers have been increasing incessantly year after year.

Few years back, Timothy Tiah was just a student of University College London who dreamt of working in investment banks because it was supposed to be a lucrative and over-paying vocation. Now, standing before us is the co-founder of Nuffnang, which is Asia Pacific’s first blog advertising community.

After a brief but intense introduction by hosts of the event, Tiah started off by first introducing himself. I was rather shocked to find out that he was a former student of HELP. It has been 2 years Tiah gave talks to people of the business sector or in conference but never has he given talks to students. This gave us HELP students, privileges to attend his talk, which I found it amusing and mind-blowing.

Sharing his life experiences enthusiastically with us, Tiah lessen the looming intensity in the room as he cracked some jokes. Which soon, turned the stranger-like environment into a rather friendly one.

As the presentation moved on, Tiah enlightened us on the inspiration and idea behind the famously known Nuffnang. It all started with Timothy himself having a guest book online. He later embraced blogging into his life. Tiah’s first blog was shared with a friend where the both of them would blog about jokes to make each other laugh. It was the gradual increase of traffic to his blog that aided Tiah in finding out that blogs also do share similar potentials as other mass media in advertising merchandises and events.  

Tiah was in his final years of university when the idea struck him. He consulted his friend as the they both worked out the pros and cons of starting a business like that. As for the name “Nuffnang,” they didn’t really had a brain-storming session on it. Tiah wanted to call it “Pixels” at first, which was quite brilliant of him because advertisements in Malaysia were measured in pixels. However, his friend begged to differ, thought otherwise and gave Timothy 3 reasonable reasons as to why they should call it “Nuffnang” instead. The discussion culminated with Tiah giving in. So, “Nuffnang” it is.

Tiah was proud that he made a wise decision back then to put his investment in the “Nuffnang” business and not on his education for the Masters. Although he specified that the success of “Nuffnang” was only 30% effort and 70% luck, I doubted it. Being the first to step foot on the blog advertising community wasn’t any easy at all. Determination, perseverance, and hard work were very much needed than luck to put things into place, because you won’t have any reference to refer to and you would have to face an uncertain risk of failure. Of course, cooperation was also one of the factors that granted success its pathway.

I couldn’t stop feeling flabbergasted as Tiah explained to us his road to success.

Then came Q & A session. When asked whether or not it is okay to take blogging as a full-time job, Timothy Tiah warned us strictly that it would be safer to take up another job and not to rely solely on blogging as the source of income. According to Timothy, we would never know how long this trend of blogging would last. Take Frienster for example, which used to be the hottest website where teenagers like us hang out online, unfortunately, Friendster is now being replaced by Facebook and Twitter. Hence, you might be earning bucks from blogs today, but who knows, blogging craze might just die out tomorrow and that would cut you completely off your income source.

To wrap up this post, we shouldn’t blog just for the money or the traffic we would get in return. However, we should treat them as an added bonus and blog for ourselves, to express our thoughts. As that would make blogging all the more exciting and fun!