Godin's company is Squidoo. It's an odd little web page builder thing. A "Lens" is what he calls a "page". Because if he called it a page, then no one would care. Now almost no one does.
"One disadvantage of living off the revenues of your company is that you have to keep running it."
that's an odd "disadvantage", Paul. It implies that running my company is something I don't want to do. Don't know about you, but I LOVE running my company.
you mean like 37Signals? ok, they're in chicago, not iowa (same thing, right?) But they didn't have connections until they created bitchin products. The connections are the easy part.
Here's the only answer you need: It doesn't matter.
You can make it work. You're a motivated developer/entrepreneur. You'll be fine. Work whichever variables (roommates, location, dining, etc.) you want to meet your budget, but this town is geared to you. You might spend a lot, but you'll make a lot too.
Here's two random data points for you:
1. I, coincidentally this morning, just asked my first question on LinkedIn. I had my first answer in 25 minutes. Done.
2. S&P runs a service called Vista Research. They've built a stable of experts in various vertical markets, and they've cultivated an advisory client list. So the clients come in with crazy questions about things impacting their business or investment decisions and S&P hooks them up with the Expert to answer. The Experts bill the client, and S&P also bills the client as a subscriber with access to all the experts. (I'm an 'expert' and get a question once a month or so. It's never turned into business for our company yet though.) Theirs is a super-premium service for people making $million decisions. It's also heavily manual. Recruiting experts, selling clients, matching clients to experts, etc. Maybe there's some web2.0 optimization of that niche to be had.
You mention 'market research groups' and maybe that's your differentiation niche. Some statistically sound methodology that Google and LinkedIn and Yahoo don't provide. Then you can build your audience by dealing with a professional groups of question askers. Consumer products, advertising, anything with a mass audience likes to base on market research.
So you've got 2500 unique visitors this month doing 50k page views. general, social network traffic might generate $1-2 cpm so that's $100/month in revenue.
if you have a high value niche with targeted, quantifiable traffic you can get that maybe as high as $50/cpm on a well marketed site (read: you have ad sales people or you're cramming the site with ad channels.)
This guy
http://www.johnchow.com/make-money-on-the-internet-april-2007/
has grown his blog to 250,000 page views, crammed it with every kind of contextual ad you can think of, is a compelling writer with great content. He's at $50/cpm. Of that, 40% comes from a pay-per-post ReviewMe ad thing, so his ads are generating about $30cpm.
So you can put adsense on the page, but you won't make any money. and you're a ways off from doing banner ads.