Don't confuse a lifestyle business that people do as a labor of love with a successful full media organization that can afford to pay people salaries and benefits. Not diminishing LWN, but it's not the same as a Dr. Dobb's or GigaOm.

Also, most successful smaller media publishers who are not purely ad-based have diversified into other areas.TidBITS is a smaller operation and can pay some salaries, but they supplement with their fantastic book business too. They diversify and have built what they can sustain

Jon Corbet's been pretty open that LWN's at best barely broken even, if that. Though last I recall his talking about this was a couple of years ago.

I've actually drifted off it in the past few years largely as I'm simply not tracking Linux-related stuff all that closely any more. Though for that, LWN is absolutely excellent. It's certainly seen numerous other contenders buried.