You are right and wrong. Not many people go to that page. My home page is http://chandoo.org/wp/ where most of my readers and search audience end up. And I open Excel School once every three months. I am doing this as it gives me opportunity to spend time with students and learn / teach better.
You would see lot more links and publicity the next time it opens.
I will also be editing the home page HTML to add link ES and other product pages. Thanks for your suggestion.
Google docs, zoho and office web apps provide most of Excel's basic functionality. I am sure they will evolve to be more usable, functional during next 5 years.
And yes, you are right. 100k is revenues. Costs are there. Mainly rent, affiliate commissions, blog hosting expenses, site maintenance, outsourcing fees (to contractors). While I do not have audited figures yet, the expenses should be less than 20% of revenues. May be even less.
I agree. If you read my thoughts under "sustainability", this is what I talk about.
"I love spending time with my customers and community and learning new things. I like teaching and enjoy writing. I also want my business to have meaningful social presence. There is tremendous scope for doing all this while making decent money ($100k-$200k per year). While technologies may change, I can adopt and continue to be passionate about data, analytics, visualization in future and share what I learn with my audience. This is more sustainable."
yes, online training is one part of what I do. This itself is quite big market with lots of potential. I have a set of excel templates for project management that I sell thru my site. These are my main products.
I have been writing about Excel for last 3 years at my blog - http://chandoo.org/wp/ Once the blog gained momentum, naturally I made it a business by offering few products and training programs.I use my blog as sole marketing platform for finding new customers and convert existing readers to customers (apart from offering kickass content...)
For a detailed breakup - see here: http://startupdesi.com/costs-of-running-web-business/
I did not include my hours in to this. But then I never do it.