Lots of speculation here <sigh>. To clear some things up...
I am making under $200/month from the ads on the blog. This may come a bit as a shocker. A little digging around on the blog's pages should lead you to the broker rates fairly easily. They're public, unlike most other places.
A little digging around should also lead you to the correct annual expenses, the fact that me and DW do share a car (I just don't drive it) but that I don't recommend getting one; why we live in the bay area and not somewhere cheaper, that my annual expense is 6-7k, not 15k (unless by that you meant the two of us together), etc.
Back to the ads... I have not monetized my blog until a couple of months ago (August 2010). I am currently making under $200/month. In total, I've made about $250 over the lifetime of the blog. Yeah, sure, someone smart could probably make much more if that was the key focus of their writing. There are actually lots of blogs like that who are all into SEO writing, link exchanges and networking to boost their ad revenue. My 44000 alexa ranking does NOT correspond to 1 million hits per month.
You can see the
stats here.
The blog is very different from most personal finance blogs. A typical large pf blog has average visit times of around 30-40 seconds. They are well linked and rank high in google. When people search for something (like "index investing") google leads them to one of those blogs because there's an article there that has been SEO optimized for those keywords. The person then stays for 30-40 seconds, enough to read about two sentences and then they click on an ad. Very lucrative.
On my blog most people actually read the entire post.
An analogy to understand the impact and the high alexa rating is to think of a blog as a building with two doors: enter and exit. A regular blog has very many people entering all the time, but they don't stay long and so the total number in the building is #people multiplied by staying time, say 20000 people per day times 30 seconds = 10000 minutes. My blog has fewer people entering but they stay much longer, say 2000 people per day times 300 seconds = 10000 minutes. There are equally many people in the building, so the impact is quantitatively the same. Qualitatively it's much different. My hits are here to read posts. Traditional hits come due to a search engine and then they click on ads. I hope this made sense.
Indeed, I accept donations, but understand that internet users feel very much entitled to getting things for free. Less than 1% of readers have made a donation. We're talking another $250 over the lifetime. How many here have ever donated anything to the sites they frequent?
Now, this may be hard to accept/relate to, but I blog because I like it, frustrating as it occasionally is. I am a writer. I do what I enjoy. It is probably similar to why many here post on the forum. You're part of a community. Maybe if you could slap some ads on and you could make some money doing what you do anyway, you'd do it; but you wouldn't change your writing style to make more money, right? I wouldn't. This is similar to how some people volunteer in animal shelters or whatever. Their key motivation is not to make money regardless of how smart they are. It's not that they say no to money. It's not like nonprofit services give away everything for free. It's just that income is pretty far down in terms of priorities. You'll probably realize a radical change in your attitude towards more money between pre-FI (can't get enough of it) and post-FI (don't need any more of it).
The book was indeed written to allow some closure. I feel that I'm repeating myself on my blog more and more often. This is not something I enjoy [repeating myself]. On the other hand, I do help a lot of people (so they tell me), so this keeps the blog going although I spend less and less time on it.
In terms of total work load, it corresponds to about 250 forum posts per month. Anyone here writing more than that?
Anyway, sorry about the rant ...
