Cory Rudl has been in the internet marketing game a long time. Although I'm not a fan of self-proclaimed gurus I have no reason not to believe he was. $40 mil is alot, but thats just sales, take off the advertising & affil expenses and its probably a much more reasonable number.
I was reading a few threads on mainstream webmaster board and a lot of people were saying his stuff really helped them actually start making money on the net in the late 90s. Some guy said he bought a program from Rudl to scrape e-mail addresses off usenet for spamming
