Matt, a huge part that I think he has left out is the use of outsourcing stuff offshore. A lot of his projects seem to be content plays. You can get lots of content produced offshore for very cheap.
The end result? You can have 5 people working full-time at $500/month each($2500/month), each producing content for 50 of your sites. Now you might wonder how one guy can write content for 50 sites. It's actually not that hard. Give 2 hours per blog post per site. And in a 9hrs day, you can cover 3-4 sites, averaging out to about 2 blog posts/month per site--which can be profitable in the big scheme of things.
When quality is not a huge consideration, you can get a lot of cheap stuff done offshore.
I'd still not give you odds on making more than $1 per 'project' per day though.
Factoring in all the costs you'd be very happy to be a bit above break even after a year with tons of 'content' ripped by mfa sites that don't do all the work and that don't invest the money. They'll be making your profit. And at $1 / day per project you're not going to spend any time suing the infringers either.
It's totally doable IMO. A friend of mine who knows nothing more than how to setup a wordpress(answer: get her bf to do it) wrote 20 posts and forgot about the blog. She gets ~$50 check from google every month. She was laughing about it.
The life time value of her blog post is pretty cool!
I don't know if it scales(I'm presuming it does from posts like the OP). But hey I like the initial numbers.
A small site about a project that I built years ago.
I rebuilt it using drupal, and the template had a nice spot for a google ad in it so I thought oh well, whatever, let's do that.
To my surprise it made some money! Hey I thought, that's easy, let's do that some more. And that's when I ran in to the statistics of the thing, when the numbers get larger the payout seems to drop considerably.
$50 per month is great as 'found' income, and as long as your site is small you'll be able to stay under the radar of the cloners, but as soon as you start getting significant traffic (as in show up on alexas 100,000 or so) then you're going to be cloned left right and center.
You'll be competing with your own content on 20 other sites.
Even on HN we get plenty of 'blogspam' submissions that are basically nothing but the original article quoted with a one line addition (if that).
The end result? You can have 5 people working full-time at $500/month each($2500/month), each producing content for 50 of your sites. Now you might wonder how one guy can write content for 50 sites. It's actually not that hard. Give 2 hours per blog post per site. And in a 9hrs day, you can cover 3-4 sites, averaging out to about 2 blog posts/month per site--which can be profitable in the big scheme of things.
When quality is not a huge consideration, you can get a lot of cheap stuff done offshore.