The way I see it is: magazine writers can make money from writing articles for papers. Gruber does something like that, except he self-publishes. He makes money the same way - advertising - he creates a gorgeous aesthetic to his site to convince people to read his stuff... he's like a one-man magazine.
I call it gorgeous because it does away entirely with distractions. It's easy-to-read, it's got minimal-but-present branding with the star logo, and I like the way he handles URLs - which is one of the only times he has any styling present. It's extremely uncompromising and I find that reading his essays feels very good on my eyes, which is really the only way I can judge online content.
Compared to TechCrunch or the Gawker bunch or even a lot of tumblelogs, I think his is gorgeous. I'd even put him above Kottke by a wee notch in terms of aesthetic, though it's admittedly close.
