Arnold Kim is a nephrologist who left his practice to become a professional blogger.

As crazy as it seems, for these past 8 years, MacRumors has been a hobby or part-time job. I think most people would have made this move long before me, but the momentum of my “other” career made it difficult for me to break free.

I started MacRumors.com in February of 2000. I was in my 4th and last year of medical school. I had been dabbling in the web for fun and decided to focus a natural interest of mine (Apple) into a website. My work on the site has since had its ups and downs. Over the next 8 years, I completed medical school, an Internal Medicine residency, a fellowship in Nephrology and even worked two years in private practice as a physician (Nephrologist).

Keith J Kaplan at Digital Pathology Blog did some math while searching for the reason why Kim left medicine. Well, Kim’s average salary can be somewhere around 135.000$ a year (according to Payscale) while

Silicon Alley Insider quotes Quantcast numbers reporting a “staggering 37 million page views a month“. This makes MacRumors, #571th biggest site on the whole Internet. If we assume quite modest monetization at $1 CPM (cost per thousand pageviews), he would be making about $37K a month. If he monetizes at $10 CPM that would be $370K a month.

To get the real feel for the numbers, compare to RevolutionHealth.com, which raised hundreds of millions of dollars, while only attaining #898 rank on Quantcast.

This is how a blog can lead to a career.

Do you know any professional or semi-professional medical bloggers?