The numbers he sites are really low. However, this tidbit is interesting and potentially surprising...

Quoted: Small sites (less than 1M page views/month) earn 3x better on their remnant ad inventory than medium (>1M page views/month) and large Web sites (>100M page views/month).

The trick, in my opinion, if you are a larger site is to slice your inventory into smaller (and higher CPM) pieces.

Some good data on what people are making on Facebook...

Quoted: Great data from Justin Smith on Facebook app CPMs: What CPM is your app making? Data from Facebook Developers. Thanks to Justin for putting together these great numbers.

Quoted: Now, the Techcrunch article discusses the idea that small sites monetize better than large ones. I think that's actually a correlation rather than a causation. There are a ton of small sites out there, and much of their traffic comes from Google. It's much harder to build a functioning social site where people coming back daily than a site where people occassionally stumble on it through their search engine.

Quoted: Figures released by the Newspaper Association of America show that the decline of newspapers is more rapid than previously thought, with total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunging 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006, the biggest drop in revenue since 1950, the year they started tracking annual revenue.

This has been my theory as to the decline in Google's paid click metrics (and the corresponding drop in the stock). Good to see someone else in agreement!

Quoted: The short story: the changes to the clickable area in Google ads has resulted in a decline in accidental clicks, resulting in the overall click rate to decline. If Google is seeing a decline in CTR it’s at least in part due to its November decision.

Don't fully understand this.

Quoted: Most people think that the search and advertising markets are both likely to be extremely profitable for the top two players if there’s a duopoly; if on the other hand it settles down as a triopoly, then the margins will get squeezed and #2 and #3 will have a hard tie doing better than break-even. Right now, in the US, Google’s #1 in both, with Yahoo! #2 and Microsoft #3.

Read about this guy in "The 4-Hour Workweek". He financed his Olympic gold metal run by starting some IT companies.

However, Wikipedia is not too gung ho about his actual businesses:

Quoted: The brothers originally got involved in IT business to help fund their skiing careers. A number of computer security companies have advisories about the companies, indicating that they distribute browser-hijackers and spyware.[1][2] Begg-Smith has been reluctant to talk to the media about them following his gold medal win, stating that their business was technology and it was up to ad customers to decide what type of ads they wished to run.

Quoted: So let's talk about this... Are social networks making money hand over fist? Why or why not?
...
To aid this discussion, I'll go through a couple of the critical challenges that affect social network monetization:

Nice. We had to set this up ourselves since there was no hosted version.

Quoted: OpenAds, a free and Open Source ad network with more than 30 thousand installs, has announced a forthcoming hosted version of its service and another round of venture financing. RWW's Sean Ammirati discussed OpenAds and the desirability of a hosted version in a May post here titled Google's Potential Vulnerability - An Open Ad Network