Joel Comm | |
|---|---|
 Joel Comm circa 2015 | |
| Born | Joel Comm May 5, 1964 |
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | InfoMedia, ClassicGames |
| Notable work | The AdSense Code, Twitter Power, iFart Mobile |
| Website | joelcomm |
Joel Comm (born May 5, 1964)[1] is an American author and Internet marketer. Comm is the CEO of InfoMedia, a social media consulting company. Comm is the founder of ClassicGames, a family-friendly multiplayer gaming website he sold to Yahoo! in 1997 and was the precursor for Yahoo! Games. He is the author of The New York Times bestseller and Bloomberg Businessweek bestselling book, The AdSense Code.[2]
Comm began his career as a radio personality, where he played music and was a weatherman. He later became a mobile disc jockey and then moved to Internet marketing because he knew he could become wealthier with an online career.[3]
Comm began using the Internet in the 1980s, experimenting with modems and bulletin boards related to playing computer games.[4] In 1995, Comm started his first website, WorldVillage.[5] WorldVillage is a virtual village where created by Comm's company InfoMedia.[6] The children's website offers trivia competitions and games.[7] He maintained the site solely through online advertising.[8] According to Radio Ink, he made several hundred dollars daily from Google's AdSense.[3] Comm also founded DealofDay.com, WorldVillage's sister site, in 1999. DealofDay.com is a directory of several hundred discounts. Comm receives money from businesses every time his site refers a purchaser. The network of sites in 2003 had 130,000 members.[9] Comm is the CEO of InfoMedia, a social media consulting company.[10]
He created ClassicGames,[5] a family-friendly multiplayer gaming website that offers widely played card games and board games like bridge, checkers, chess, Euchre, Go, hearts, poker, and spades.[11][12] In 1997, he sold ClassicGames to Yahoo! for $1 million.[5][13][14] Yahoo! used the acquisition as a basis for starting the website Yahoo! Games in April 1998.[15]
In 2007, Joel Comm conceived of the show The Next Internet Millionaire with Eric Holmlund.[16] Based on the NBC show The Apprentice, it was the first Internet reality show.[17] Hosted by Comm, the show pitted 12 contestants against each other to vie for a $25,000 finalist prize and the opportunity to join Comm on a project with the goal of earning $1 million.[18]
Comm in 2008 created iFart Mobile, a best-selling app that he sold on iTunes Store.[5] The app plays a fart noise when triggered. It has a "stealth" addition that enables people to set a timer for when the app will emit the fart sound. iFart further has a "security" feature that triggers a fart sound if the phone's position changes.[19] The $0.99 app[20] was ranked first on Apple Inc.'s App Store after its initial 14 days, having been bought 100,000 times.[21] It used to be in the 20 most downloaded iPhone apps ever and in October 2010 had 20,000 reviews.[21] VentureBeat in December 2008 noted that the app was making Comm almost $10,000 daily.[22]
He authored The AdSense Code: What Google Never Told You about Making Money with AdSense, which describes for businesses how to achieve the highest revenue from Google's AdSense.[8] It started as an e-book readers could purchase on his website, and in 2006, it was published by Morgan James Publishing.[8] The book was on The New York Times Best Seller list and the Bloomberg Businessweek bestseller list in 2006.[2][23] The New York Times described the book as a "user's manual for how to attract targeted traffic by a deeper understanding of Google Adsense code".[24] In his 2007 book Clear Blogging, Robert Walsh wrote that despite The Adsense Code's having a "'Make Money Now!' tone", it was an "extremely useful book" for being successful with AdSense.[25]
In 2009, he authored Twitter Power, a John Wiley & Sons-published book that introduces readers to Twitter, describing how it became widely used, how to set up a Twitter account, and how to grow their number of Twitter followers.[26][27] The book received positive reviews in Entrepreneur, January Magazine, and Mint for being written with simplicity and without jargon.[28][29][30] In CNET article titled "Twitter power? For real?", journalist Charles Cooper criticized the book for providing a "phony formula where you just paint by the numbers" to attempt to lure Twitter followers to become customers.[31]
