Gruber has perfected the art of knowing your audience - and his audience is people who are neck deep in the Apple ecosystem. His writing is practically a prescription for managing post-purchase cognitive dissonance for Apple consumers.
I think he's an excellent writer but let's be honest, he doesn't really "review" Apple products any more than their marketing department. Apple could re-introduce the Newton and Gruber would be writing about it's "elegant simplicity" and "thoughtful processing".
I'm sure the Apple Watch is neat tech, but from what I've gathered, it's suffering from "version one syndrome" a little more than most of their product launches. That said, it will probably be a wild success anyway if only because it's an even more conspicuous consumption signal than the iPhone...
> it's an even more conspicuous consumption signal than the iPhone
At least until people start budgeting for their annual watch upgrade like they do for their phones, at which point it'll be commodity just like a smartphone.
By his own admission his podcast, The Talk Show, makes more money than his blog at this point. Just another reason the "paid blogger" dismissive misses the mark.
He wrote the original Markdown. Barely anyone uses the original Markdown. They just use semi-compatible formats (e.g. Github-Flavored Markdown) using software that calls them "Markdown".
There is no spec for Markdown other than his buggy Perl implementation. He also didn't exactly appreciate the fact that other people tried to standardize "his" language.
I'm not even sure Markdown in general can rightfully be called an invention (in the same sense as JSON is not considered such by its "inventor"). It's just one of several plain-text formatting conventions that happened to become popular (though, again, not really his exact implementation).
In fact, because of the limited scope Gruber's original Markdown addressed and the redundancies he implemented (such as the different "bullets" for unordered lists) are biting implementers now that the format is used for other things than originally envisioned (by making extensions difficulty or unintuitive).
Although you are right that people are getting more and more distant from the original markdown syntax. Google still suggest this as the first result on that specific keyword [1].
Something more. Categorising markdown as an invention may be a bit wrong, but it is a huge push to what now is becoming a standard ( at least in dev's world ) for many companies that have a user input feature.
I can't just say everything he did is good ( I also miss standartization ), but for sure I can't neglect what he did. I still remember how markdown-featured textarea inputs redirected to [1] when I clicked on the help button.
This alone makes his attribution great and that's why I prefer calling him "inventor of markdown", rather than paid blogger.
I believe that some of the most popular celebrity ones bring in seven figures at least, and some of the get-rich-quick scam ones also do very well. You also have marginal cases like Gawker; is it a blog network, or a media site?
He's a thoughtful writer, and a writer first and foremost. He takes it very seriously. Frequently posts about things like style, typography and serious journalism.
As far as I can tell, he makes money from three sources. First, is the single ad on the from The Deck on his site. Second, he sells sponsorships for his RSS feed. Lastly, he makes money from ads on his podcast. So, it's not just his site. I think he makes more money from the RSS feed sponsorships than he does for the Deck ad, though.
I think he's the only one I've ever heard of who gets paid so much to write blog articles.