[snuxoll]

Sure, if you have a premium product you can justify those rates - but your market is also shockingly small for said premium product. There's literally only two reasons for paid DM's to exist - A) they offer said premium experience or B) there's a huge imbalance of players to DM's. Not everybody wants to pay the money it would require to have a Matthew Mercer as their DM, and if more people just realized that being a DM is not the intimidating/tedious/boring job they thing it is there wouldn't be such a huge imbalance.

I guess I don't want to say you cannot make a living off being a paid DM, but you will have to be in the top percentiles to justify your price doing so and compete in a shallow market. Everyone else is on borrowed time until the player:dm balance naturally normalizes, and speaking as a DM myself I do my utmost to convince others to give it a shot because it's an incredibly enjoyable and rewarding experience.