You're assuming that the RSS feed sponsorship is sold out, and is sold out at rate card rates. Those are very aggressive assumptions. I estimated about $60,000 in annual revenue from RSS, assuming a 30% average discount to rate card rates and 75% fill rate. (Reductions of 25% to 50% are not uncommon in online advertising.)
For The Deck, founder Jim Coudal told me that $4,000 a month to the publisher is in the ballpark but a little low. So I assumed about $60,000 a year, or $5,000 a month. (Don't forget that The Deck itself is a for-profit enterprise, and takes a hefty cut.)
So I got to about $120,000 a year before t-shirt sales. Like I said... could be much higher. But I wanted to err on the side of caution, especially in this ad economy.
Very satisfying to see one man armies getting so successful.
I admittedly don't know very much about this sort of thing. Is being sold out for the next month good, or cutting it close? If it's the former, it would be safe to assume Gruber's selling at the rate card rate most of the time, no?
The Daring Fireball feed sponsorship costs $2,500 for _one week_. That’s $130,000 a year right there.
http://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/
The Deck pulls in $180,000 a month with 45 affiliated content sources. So if the profits are divided equally, or if Gruber earns the average revenue, then that’s $4000 a month. Some of the affiliate blogs hardly ever produce content and other blogs hide the ad at the bottom of the page, so I doubt that they divide revenue equally between them. I’d be very surprised if Daring Fireball didn’t pull down at least 3 times the Deck average. Call it $150,000.
http://decknetwork.net/
That would put us at $280,000 per year even before T-Shirt sales.