Sure they can! It isn’t easy. It requires luck, patience, a LOT of hard work, and most importantly…talent. The typical blog that ends up monetizing starts off like everyone else. With an idea and no audience. You create the best content you can and focus on building an audience. This can take years. Once you have a large enough audience you can start looking into advertising options. From all I’ve seen, 100,000 unique visitors per day seems to be the point where you can POSSIBLY start making a livable wage. Also at that point, you may get offers from bigger blog networks to essentially sell your blog and work under their umbrella. I’m in it for the long haul. I know it could be 2-3 years before this becomes a possibility. But I’m steadily growing my following at an exponential rate. As long as I can keep doing what I’m doing, I think I’ll get there.