How an engineering student accidentally started a thriving science news site
Hüseyin Kilic grew Interesting Engineering into a media behemoth with over 15.5 million social media followers.
Welcome! I'm Simon Owens and this is my media newsletter. You can subscribe by clicking on this handy little button:
Hüseyin Kilic had no ambitions to operate a media business when he opened an account on Blogspot in 2011. In fact, he barely had any concept of what a media business was.
At the time, Kilic was a university engineering student and occasionally traveled to his hometown in Turkey to help his father run an internet café. “Customers could rent a computer on an hourly basis,” he told me. “I would sometimes play games with the customers, but after some time I grew bored.” He wanted to improve his English language skills, and it occurred to him that he could do so through blogging. So he launched one at interestingengineering.blogspot.com.
Today, Kilic readily admits that he had no idea what he was doing. Whenever he read an article that he enjoyed, he simply copy and pasted the entire thing onto his blog. “I wasn’t trying to steal other people’s work,” he said. “I was just reading this content, I liked it, and I wanted to use my blog to feature it. I was treating it like a notepad.”
It didn’t take long for Kilic to get bored with the blog, and he pretty much abandoned it when he went back to school. “I had midterms and I had to study a lot,” he said. “I was a hard working student.” Another four weeks passed before he went back to his father’s internet café. When he logged into his Blogspot dashboard, he was shocked to see that the site was getting over 1,000 visits a day, mostly from Google. “After that, I was interested in learning more about this — how people came to the web page, how I can convert it into money.”
Kilic fell down an internet rabbit hole where he learned about things like SEO and Google Adsense. He quickly realized that, while plagiarizing content was frowned upon, he could summarize news and then link back to the original source. As he incorporated more and more of his learnings into the blog, its audience growth accelerated.
Flash forward 10 years, and Interesting Engineering – which I’ll henceforth refer to as IE – is one of the most popular science news publishers in the world. Not only does it generate millions of visits on its website, but it also has massive reach across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. And while Kilic built the business through ad-funded content aggregation, he has ambitions to publish more longform journalism and place it behind a subscription paywall.
How did a Turkish college student with no journalism experience and a shaky grasp of English accomplish such a feat? I recently interviewed Kilic about IE’s journey from a one-person blog to a full-fledged media company that employs dozens of people and reaches millions of consumers worldwide.
Let’s jump into my findings…
Riding the Facebook wave
Kilic made two consequential decisions in the early days of running IE.
The first was that he signed up for a Google Adsense account. His earnings were relatively small at first, but with the low cost of living in Turkey he was able to hire a few English-speaking freelancers who helped dramatically increase the site’s article output.
The second was that he launched an accompanying Facebook page. His timing was perfect, in that this was the era when Facebook, eager to get publishers addicted to its platform, began heavily promoting their page content within the Newsfeed. With IE’s penchant for aggregating viral science news, its stories performed well with Facebook’s algorithm, which led to astronomical growth. “Every page was growing at that time,” Kilic recalled. He started engaging in content swaps with other larger page owners where he’d share their content in exchange for them sharing his. “I remember that at one point we were getting 30,000 new followers every day.”
As traffic grew, so did Kilic’s earnings, some of which he used to hire even more freelance writers. He paid people via a Paypal account connected to his father’s bank account. In 2013, he graduated with his engineering degree. “I entered university as a poor student because my family situation was very bad,” he said. “But when I graduated, I was the richest student of the university, and everyone was talking about me.” Kilic compared it to being a YouTube star. By that time IE’s Facebook page had over 1 million likes.
One might assume that Kilic would immediately embark on a full-time career of running IE, but he didn’t even consider that as an option. “I didn’t think I could create a future with the blog. There was no industry in Turkey for that, especially in my home town. Even in Istanbul I couldn’t find people.” Military service is compulsory in Turkey, and Kilic knew he’d be shipped off to a place where he didn’t have regular access to the internet. “I left everything to my Nigerian friend. I paid him and a couple freelance writers six months of salary, and I told them I’m going to the military and there will be no internet. Everything is on you. Take care of this blog.” He also gave the login credentials for Google Adsense to his sister, and he called her every day to ask about the earnings.
Those earnings did drop while he was in military service, but the strategy at least prevented the site from losing momentum. When he came back, he took over running IE while resuming his search for a job. “My idea was that if I could get one year as an engineer and run IE part time, then after a year I could quit my job and focus on IE full time.” That way, if IE later failed he at least had the relevant experience that would allow him to find another engineering job.
Kilic did end up finding a job — as an engineer at a Jaguar factory in the UK —but he didn’t last long. Within six months, IE’s Facebook engagement shot up even more, and Google Adsense started paying out 10X of what he had been earning from it while in Turkey. Up until then, he had still been routing everything through his father’s bank account, but he decided finally that it was time to move back to Turkey and formally establish a company.
Given his inability to find talent in his family’s hometown, this meant renting office space in Istanbul. By 2018, IE had two full-time editors, and Kilic slowly began building up a team. Even in a major city with millions of people, this proved difficult. “I was very bad with management.” People would often suggest their own friends to fill roles, and in Kilic’s rush to fill positions he made several bad hires that didn’t pan out. Eventually, his hiring and management skills improved, and by the end of 2016 he felt that he had a reliable team in place.