On 150,000 pageviews a month I make about $50.00 from adsense. "1.6% CTR with 0.85c CPC" seems pretty unrealistic to me.
It really depends on a number of factors including the audience, their intent, how they find your site, the site layout, etc.
It may not be common but I wouldn't say it's unrealistic.
PS: If you're making $50 from 150,000 page views per month, are you open to selling the site?
However, the article is saying it is incredibly easy to do this. On that point I disagree. I think if you spend a lot of time working on finding the right niche and developing the site that you can definitely pull it off, but I don't think it's easy. And, as someone else pointed out there are a lot more interesting ways to make $2000/mo building a niche web app.
If you use Wordpress, consider using something like http://www.ctrtheme.com or ProSense.
In April, I had a 1.78% CTR.
The shitty thing is, it is an AJAX app, so there is only the frontpage, and each lookup does not refresh the Adsense ad. The average time on the site is about 12 minutes.
This is also not a very high volume search term. So the upside for me is pretty limited. Even if I ranked #1, ahead of the .gov site, I do not think I would come close to $2,000.
It should be pretty simply to reload the contents of your ad block in the "success" callback of your Ajax library... you're probably leaving a ridiculous amount of money on the table.
It's pretty much impossible to claim any CTR or CPC rate is unrealistic because they vary so massively depending on the site, the market and even things like the time of year.
0.02% CTR on 50k page views a month; revenue under $1. I guess that's the compromise you make when your niche is involved articles for a technical audience, but is there a way to improve that?