For eight years, Arnold Kim has been trading gossip, rumour and facts about Apple, the notoriously secretive computer company, on his site, MacRumors.com.

It had been a hobby — albeit a time-consuming one— while Dr Kim earned his medical degree. He kept at it as he completed his medical training and began diagnosing patients’ kidney problems. Kim’s website now attracts more than 4.4 million people and 40 million page views a month, according to Quantcast, making it one of the most popular technology websites.

It is enough to make Kim hang up his stethoscope. This month he stopped practicing medicine and started blogging full time.

“In some ways I’ve neglected the site for so long,” he said in a telephone interview. “Now that I actually have a chance to work on it full time, there’s a good chance it can grow more.”

Kim epitomises 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 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.”

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