Do these stories sound realistic? Maybe it is easier for a site targeted towards truly "non-geeks" to make money using AdSense?
Scott says she posted an unsold novel on Google and earns about $5 a month from the AdSense ads on the site. Al Needham, 74, who runs a site about the care of bees (bees-online.com) from his home near Boston, reaps about $250 a month.
"Forget about getting rich overnight," says Alonzy. "It takes time to learn."
--
There are bajillions of AdSense customers, so some of them are making bank and most are making squat. I don't know that it's easy to make money from an adsense site, but if I were doing it, I would NOT make a geek site. Geeks don't like to click (heck, I use AdBlockPlus so I don't even see them!).
This is why we'd all utterly suck at going this route. :-)
----- Full findings of the study, its methodology and results are being presented this afternoon at the iMedia Brand Summit in Coconut Point, Florida. ----
From the article: "I put in two, maybe three hours a day on the site, and the checks pour in," he says. "What's not to like?"
My first reaction was that if you spend three hours per day and earn a huge amount of money then why not spend six hours per day and earn twice as much money? He cannot do that because he's maxed his niche. Any additional effort obtains diminishing returns and he cannot scale this success as a business with employees.
Most webmasters who make money operate more than one website (usually by themselves) and if they need more work done, they simply outsource it by hiring writers (if it's a content site), having someone do some PHP work, etc.
I guess this is why most webmasters make a lot more money than the average hacker here. It seems a lot of those on Hacker News fall into the "build one site, one unique idea, pitch it to an investor, form a company for this single website, receive a lot of money and try to monetize it later" idea and waste a lot of time on something that probably won't work, or, if it does, take an incredibly long time to see any returns. In contrast, most of the people making real money don't worry about forming a company (until they start to make enough money to justify it), do everything themselves, and don't try to build the next "killer web app" (most probably have limited programming knowledge) but instead create useful websites that they can monetize via AdSense and CPM networks right away while working on SEO and building content.