[corresation]

Marco Arment is a cofounder of hugely successful Tumblr and creator of Instapaper, both of which certainly make or made him more money than he'll ever make from ads on his blog, however popular.

The GP post should be nuked from orbit, but the reasoning you put there is hilariously specious. If it is so irrelevant, then why are they there? Why does Arment stuff entries full of credibility-diminishing "sponsored by" text, or worse insidious Amazon affiliate links?

Every ounce of reality says that he cares very much about his blog income, your imaginings of his external wealth notwithstanding.

[swombat]

He can make something in the thousands of dollars a month of income from his blog. That's pretty good, and it probably pays for quite a few monthly expenses, so he'd be stupid not to put this one nonintrusive ad on there.

Not putting a small ad on there that pays thousands of dollars would just be silly.

As a comparison, swombat.com has no ads because the amount of money attached to it would simply be too small to bother (tens of dollars a month at the very most, if that much). If it was a few thousand, I'd put a small ad on there even if I had millions in the bank.