I know a little birdie or three who would have interesting comments to make on that figure but they wouldn't appreciate the publicity. All of them run real honest-to-God businesses which just happen to resemble a blog in form-factor when you squint a bit.

Incidentally: blogging is still a terrible way to make money for the vast majority of bloggers. The really successful ones generally use it as a friendcatcher for related business. It isn't even the most efficient friendcatcher, either.

One of the few cool things of the Mac/iOS community is how active everyone is. iOS users download/buy/actually use apps even if they're niche. Readers of marco.org and daringfireball pay attention to these sponsorship posts, I'd assume.

Apple dev/Mac fanboy.

I can affirm we eat up the stuff he promotes. Dark Sky, Pixelmator, Fantasical. I heard them all first on DF and bought each (and more). He's usually spot on in the things he promotes to (I don't think he accepts sponsors for products he doesn't think are great).

Paying for ads on his site I believe are totally worth it.

As a long time DF reader, I treat Gruber's software endorsements with more than a grain of salt (even his apparently unsponsored ones). I can't remember the name of the product, but one Ui editing program he endorsed was unbelievably bad.

Yeah, same here, from someone who's a fan otherwise. He's had some dogs, but the one that stood out to me was some weather app (not Dark Sky, which is excellent) a year or so ago. It was pretty, which I image is what caught his eye. Too bad it was crap for predicting the weather, or even getting the local temperature right for that matter. I really wondered if he ever used it for its intended purpose.

It might be more helpful for this audience to think of it as "just with ten years of work".

Wait, how is he able to make $8500 a week from the blog? And how do you know that?

Wait, he has paid membership too? Membership in what? His blog?

Sponsorships are listed on the site along with pricing:

http://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/

He has a huge following, he is considered one of the more important voices by a large number of people and he's been around for a relatively long time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daring_Fireball. People trust him, which gives him commercial value.

But the site hardly has any articles published, just mostly links, and what is the membership for?

Here are the articles: http://daringfireball.net/archive/

His blog's crowning achievement may have been when Steve Jobs replied to a controversy by just telling the journalist to read the article on Daring Fireball.

He makes more than $8500 a week. That's just for the post sponsorship. He also makes money from the Deck network ad on the side.

No memberships, sponsoring his RSS feed and getting one of these endorsement posts on the blog costs you 8500 $

I am not sure if every week is really booked though and if its really for the price listed, so i would take that with a grain of salt. No doubt hes making a ton of money though.