Your assumptions on this are off. He may be making $100K per year, but definitely not $25K for one search term. Google takes at least 40-50% of the CPC as rev share. Also, the traffic estimator you used is broad match, meaning it includes every query that somehow includes "personal development" such as "Tony Robbins personal development" or "personal development workshop". Many of these Steve will not rank for, even though he is number 1 for the exact match.
I've run a site with similar content and good search rankings that gets around 50% of the traffic of Steve's site (according to Compete), and our AdSense revenue was nowhere close to $100k per year. Even though Steve was using AdSense more aggressively, it makes me wonder how he was able to earn so much. The average earnings per click for us was only 15 cents or so.
Thanks for pointing out my mistakes. I forgot about Google's share of the CPC. Duh. I was also misreading Google's traffic estimator. That exact phrase, "personal development" only receives 14,800 searches per month. Big difference.
I've run a site with similar content and good search rankings that gets around 50% of the traffic of Steve's site (according to Compete), and our AdSense revenue was nowhere close to $100k per year. Even though Steve was using AdSense more aggressively, it makes me wonder how he was able to earn so much. The average earnings per click for us was only 15 cents or so.