His traffic has come up sharply over the last few months (Quantcast: http://www.quantcast.com/cringely.com) to ~3k/month. Compare with ParrotSecrets.com at ~13k. Cringely is just following his own advice. What he's doing is as interesting as what he's saying.
Ultra targetted non-tech savvy traffic like the parrot site gets from adwords is worth a lot.