My opinion- I once tried swapping links with one of Michael's sites, I placed the link on my site and then got around 7 spam e-mails telling me how to make my site better and improve it's ranking. When I got the lesson about making long pages and why they are so good and could make me rich I blocked his e-mails He never did put a link back on to my site and so I deleted his link, then I found a few other people that had tried to swap links with him but never received the reciprocal link back.
I don't know how many shoemoney has to get make that sort of money but I'd imagine he wouldn't be running more than say 10 - 20. That is just a vague guess though. Markus of Plenty of Fish on the other hand makes 5 - 10 times what shoemoney makes off just one site. So the number of sites isn't the real issue - it's the topic of the site and the traffic it recieves.
I still find it hard to believe that PoF makes $10K/day. There are a lot of visitors, but the ads don't even blend in.
PoF also has a fairly lucrative market - plus if Shoemoney says Markus earns that much I'm going to believe him.
I actually was in a chat w/ Shoemoney and some other people at the time, and he mentioned that while that check is actually for two months, he only uses Adsense as a 'fill in the gaps' method. His main income is from affiliate payments, and subscriptions to his ringtones sites. At any rate, sometimes it seems like shoe performs ego searches on his name here at DP, since he pops up in almost every thread he's mentioned in (or so it seems), so if you are reading this shoe, perhaps you could shed a bit more light on this?
And he deserves every minute of it. This kind of success doesn't come from scratching your ass and wondering why your Adsense hasn't doubled overnight from a few link exchanges. Hard work. Lots of ambition. Dedication to the max. Nice check Shoe, but I think it would be safe to say we haven't seen the half of it.
lol - I have nothing against the guy - he's done a lot for other people... You should read up on his Shoemoneyads Ebay ads... they rock!