3%? I have a website with 15% CTR rate--a full blown website that I update everyday. It took me 6 months of ad experimenting to find the perfect spot. I would assume someone at his level would have mastered CTR + other optimization tactics. Also, PR has nothing to do with traffic. I have some websites that average about 200 uniques/day with PR0. I don't promote or do anything with it (to be honest, I forgot about a couple of them and only check stats once or twice a month)... so for people like me, it is very easy to believe high traffic can be achieved without caring about PR.
OK so after reading thru this thread I have to chime in here. Brad Callen is a massive marketer and I can pretty much bet that his check is real as is Shoe Moneys check. I work in the insurance industry and some of the clicks that I had to to pay for on the Google PPC were as high as $17 per click! If you have one very savvy internet marketer with as much knowledge and experience as these two guys obviously have, it really doesn't take as much as you would think to rack up Adsense profits quickly. There are some industries where the actual cost per click is over $50! So how many clicks does one really need to get from of those types of sites to generate a bunch of money in a hurry. The other element that should be considered here is that those checks are issued onto one account. That account could also be administered by Brad Callen or Shoe Money and sharing the profits with other sites that already ranked very high. There are people out there such as Perry Marshal that do nothing but run Adsense campaigns for others and share in their profits. As far as the PR goes, I make a good living every month on website with a PR of 3 or less and I do it without Adsense. I can outdo many sites that have PR of 4 or higher. PR is just one measure of a site that applies to Google and their search criteria. The other engines don't care about PR and I get tons of sales from them.
Sure. I do a bunch of different things that have to do with insurance and with the way the insurance industry works, I get paid every time I enroll a new client in a plan from any one of the 23 companies I represent. In some cases I also will get paid again every time someone pays their insurance bill, or I will get paid if people are just looking for insurance and they go thru my website and I pass that traffic onto someone else. The insurance industry is HYPER COMPETITIVE online. I have a bunch of websites that I have drilled into some great niche markets and I do pretty good with them. The Adsense stuff pays small peanuts compared to what I can earn by having someone sign up for a plan from one of my websites. So I don't do Adsense any more. I have also been getting much better converting traffic from MSN than Google. Even though I am not getting a million visitors per month, from MSN, the traffic is much more targeted and willing to buy so that is where I focus most of my efforts these days. Another thing that is fun is that I have my websites set up so that people can enroll themselves online without me ever even talking to them or even getting an email. It is like getting a raise in pay every month just by keeping my websites up and happy!