The tech web site that has become a full-time job

Brian Stelter of the New York Times writes Monday about Arnold Kim, a physician who has quit practicing medicine to run his MacRumors.com web site about Apple full time.

Stelter writes, “Dr. Kim epitomizes the home-grown publishers whose wealth has been enabled by the Internet. Although few of the millions of blogs ever make their creators rich, the ones that do provide all the incentive necessary to fuel the medium.

“A question Dr. Kim often fields from friends and associates is, ‘How does that make money?’ He answered the question in an entry on his personal blog last month. It can all be ‘boiled down to one simple accomplishment: building traffic,’ he wrote. ‘That’s it. If you have a site that attracts a lot of visitors, you will be able to make money. On the Internet, traffic equals power, which subsequently equals money.’

“When Dr. Kim, who lives just outside Richmond, Va., began blogging about Apple in 2000, the word blog had not entered the lexicon. Creating anything beyond a bare-bones Web site required programming skills and tech knowledge. Dr. Kim, a computer science major at Columbia University, had the know-how. He also knew that almost everyone enjoys an advance look at future products.”

Read more here. Kim’s site draws 4.4 million visitors and 40 million page views per month.