Hmmmm. As it happens, you're wrong and to the extent your parent supports your thesis, he's wrong, too. I work for an SEO marketing firm and one of my coworkers built up a portfolio of $1/day projects exactly in the mold of this article over the course of 2 or 3 years, and once he got to about $6000/month, he quit to do it full time. And he was no genius and had very little technical skill--he hired out all his programming.
I would do it myself, but I have no desire to work on projects like that full time, even for only 2 years.
Interesting! So, what's the state now, has he been able to continue that trend? Does he have maintenance issues yet? Or does it seem like his model will scale forever?
My 'little projects' make about 800 euros or 1200 dollars per month, so that's about 1/5th of what your friend is doing, or rather was doing when he quit to start working full time.
I'm not saying it's a total failure, but it's not the success I'd hoped for either. And, to be honest at $6,000 per month I'd probably still not be too happy about it, but that's simply because I figured I'd be doing much better when I started out. (I already had a $10,000 per month project with 0 maintenance to tide me over while doing this, if it weren't for that I wouldn't have made it this far).
If he's managed to take $1 / day with 0 input from now forward then he's done very well, but from a business point of view investing 2 to 3 years and getting to $6000 (or $1200 as in my case) still does not count as time well spent.
For instance, if I had spent that time consulting it would have brought a multiple of that (but I'd have to continue to consult, which is of course the whole point of this exercise).
This is a standard guy with no real experience and no programming experience getting to $72k/yr after investing some time. Not quite living the dream, but it's not awful either given that he may not have had some outrageous education or experience and is now getting passive income that he can gradually build on.
I think anyone here with some general startup knowledge/ability (e.g., can buy a domain, set up hosting, write HTML, write content, etc) could probably build up a passive $50/day source to give them a bit of a buffer to create bigger projects. Or they should at least be trying it to see if they can pull it off.
I would do it myself, but I have no desire to work on projects like that full time, even for only 2 years.