
Ask HN: Anyone making passive (or not passive) income from a content site? - gillyb
There are many posts here about people making money off side projects or businesses they manage on their own, but it seems like almost all of them are selling a product or a service.
I&#x27;m wondering if anyone is making substantial money from a site that just generates content (and isn&#x27;t selling a service&#x2F;product) ?
(Looking for examples of people doing this on their own, not big companies running news&#x2F;content sites)
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joshklein
I wrote a semi-popular blog for a couple years as I was coming up in the
advertising agency world as a digital strategist.

I knew enough about media planning to not bother trying to monetize my
content; the ROI would never pay off if that were the goal, and I'd caution
against it, unless you already have an active audience in the 10,000+ range
who is anxiously waiting to hear your personal thoughts about a specific
topic.

The likely outcome is farther below your expectations than you're likely to
guess. We're talking thousands of hours before you make hundreds of dollars.
And the income from this activity is the opposite of "passive". Content
creation is the least scalable activity you could engage in.

The strategy that worked for me - and works for nearly everyone who sticks
with it for something like 18+ months - was to use writing (or other content
creation) as proof of expertise, seriousness, and passion. Proof that you're
an interesting person worth listening to about something that's important to
someone else.

My blog dramatically accelerated a career, led to important new business
relationships, speaking opportunities, and let me do consulting projects
(which often generate more revenue in a week than a site could make in a
year).

~~~
adventured
> Content creation is the least scalable activity you could engage in.

Don't tell 22words.com [1] and BoredPanda (and the 370 clones) about that.
They're currently riding the great Facebook junk content spam train to tens of
millions in annual revenue off a very modest amount of daily low-value
content. They're the new version of the Demand Media / Google content machines
(except they're doing the same traffic with 1/100th the content). Facebook
will smash them sooner than later as it begins to overwhelm the platform,
however it's gangbusters for now.

[1]
[https://www.quantcast.com/twentytwowords.com](https://www.quantcast.com/twentytwowords.com)

~~~
joshklein
I guess where we differ is that I don't think those are content businesses.
The OP was looking for alternatives to building a service or app, and those
businesses are automated marketing systems. I think they're closer to apps
than not.

I took the OP's question to mean s/he wanted to create content.

------
sixQuarks
Been doing this for nearly a decade, mid-six figure income. No employees, no
customers to deal with, just content that I update on a weekly basis, with
links to high-quality affiliates that I trust and actually recommend.

Anyone who can write a decent book on a subject that consumers care about can
do this, but it does take time, probably a good 3 or 4 years before you start
making decent income, would need to start it as a side project while working
full-time, but I'm convinced any decent writer can do this.

~~~
modernyogihippy
I'm a copywriter who's trying to get into affiliate.

I've literally spent the last few weeks mulling over one niche to the next.
I've read almost every post on nichehacks but still can't pick a niche.

Any advice on how to bite the bullet?

~~~
jackgolding
have you read /r/juststart?

My issue is when I could (hypothetically) bill out at $100 an hour is spending
3-4 years earning cents per hour worth it? (I do find the industry fascinating
though as someone who used to pay affiliates millions a year.)

EDIT: also the issue of being defensible and having only one primary supplier
for visibility (Google Search) and limited monetisation options which people
have had issues with (Amazon Affiliates or Ads)

~~~
j_s
If you have money you can buy content. Quality content costs more money, of
course.

------
kohanz
I have a WP blog that I wrote about my experience becoming a licensed
professional engineer, which basically entails writing up your experience and
taking an ethics exam. At the time I did it to make myself accountable to
follow through. It is a super niche area, but with very little content
addressing it, especially for free. Years later, with hardly any work from
myself, the traffic is not high (2-3k monthly) but the Adsense more than pays
for the hosting and I also generate revenue through affiliate sales to someone
that sells paid help with the application. That revenue has been roughly
$100-200 a month with as high as almost $500, during exam season.

The site is pretty much as passive as it gets at this point. I maybe spend
some time every once in a while answering questions posted the blog, but
haven't written new content in years.

------
iurisilvio
I'm not willing to share my sites, but I have some content websites, one of
them have ~2 million pageviews/month and is enough to pay my bills. The others
are small, but they improve ~10% my result.

They are 99% passive income. All of them can be improved, but I don't do
anything, I have full time job and other side projects. I feel bad for not
working on them, but I know it is the right decision to me.

To be honest, it was started as a SEO experiment. I have bad content in good
shape (all in-page SEO tricks done). I'm sure better content can improve my
results.

~~~
gillyb
Can you share how much money you make? And is it all from Adsense?

~~~
iurisilvio
They make USD 1.5-2k. In my country, it is a mid-level developer salary,
enough to cover expenses.

Most part come from Criteo and Adsense. Adsense has better performance, but is
not reliable, some sites were banned without reason. I always test other ad
networks, but these have the best performance to me.

~~~
laksmanv
Can we reach out to you via email?

~~~
iurisilvio
Sure! My websites aren't global, I'm sure people can replicate some of them in
other countries.

Send me emails to my username at gmail.

------
RileyJames
I have a low volume, long tail content site. It consistently pulls in $500 per
month. It's built on an open data set, which was poorly exposed (government
site).

I think content sites are good MVP's, but to be defensible need to be turned
into something more valuable.

~~~
xcubic
Any tips on how to do reasearch to find long tail keywords?

------
Mz
You could go browse Patreon. _Questionable Content_ is essentially a one man
show, though it started as him and his girlfriend/first wife (she apparently
did tech support and marketing, he produced the content). He has apparently
been making six figures for some years, even before Patreon was a thing.
_Girls with Slingshots_ is another webcomic supporting its author.

I believe they both do a certain amount of T-shirt sales and the like, but the
comics themselves are the main draw. T-shirts are just a means to monetize the
comics, along with Patreon, ads, etc.

There are many other Patreon supported sites out there. You could go looking
for some examples of stuff similar to the kind of content you have in mind (I
assume you have no plans to be a web comic artist).

I make some money from my low traffic websites where I publish all original
content produced by me. I occasionally get a little ad money, but most of the
income is from Patreon and tips. I have never figured out how to make money
from affiliates. So people are basically straight up paying me voluntarily to
produce content online. I hope to grow the traffic and improve the
monetization.

------
stevesearer
I run [https://officesnapshots.com](https://officesnapshots.com) \--

It is a content site which publishes office design projects from around the
world. We organize the projects and tag photos to make them useful for
professionals in the industry.

Been running it for just over 10 years and it has been my full-time work for
the last ~5.

------
tmaly
As a learning experiment, I tried my hand at an amazon affiliate site
[http://nextlesson.com](http://nextlesson.com) , but it ended up only making
67 cents. I might change the site in the future to focus more on young
learning.

I have been channeling my efforts into my food side project
[https://bestfoodnearme.com](https://bestfoodnearme.com) the content is thin
as it is only food dishes, and the site does not generate any revenue. Its
more of a scratch my own itch.

~~~
mod
I do NOT recommend that anyone click that first link.

Chrome warned me it was unsafe, but I clicked through anyway, and then it was
a loop of redirects and popups.

I didn't click the 2nd link after that experience.

~~~
tmaly
Thanks for the heads up, looks like my site was hacked. I will have to fix
that later today.

~~~
mod
No problem. I wasn't sure what to think, as I was pretty sure I knew & trusted
your username.

I don't think they did any damage!

~~~
tmaly
I disabled my nextlesson.com for now.

My food side project was a custom site I wrote in Go.

------
guohuang
I am not sure if affiliate marketing count as a content site, you are always
"selling" something directly or indirectly in order to make income, at
[http://toptalkedbooks.com](http://toptalkedbooks.com), we present the best
books to users from HN, stackoverflow and reddit. I think the bottom line is,
give quality content to users, income will follow.

~~~
modernyogihippy
Interesting site but how do you drive traffic?

There's no traditional blog or long-form content. The site is literally a
compilation of books. Though it's useful, useful I don't see how users will
find it online organically at least.

~~~
wingerlang
I guess one way it posting it on HN. This is probably the 10th time I've seen
the page mentioned and I guess HN people are the exact audience for the site.

------
deepakkarki
I curate a daily list of interesting engineering blogs at
[https://discoverdev.io](https://discoverdev.io)

As of now it's a side project, not making any $ off it. But I know a bunch of
folks who have been doing such stuff for a while and make some good beer
money!

~~~
hawkweed
I'm doing something similar with
[http://microservicesweekly.com](http://microservicesweekly.com).

It's not that easy to earn money with these kind of newsletters. You would
need to have entire network of newsletter micro-sites to make decent earnings
(e.g. [https://cooperpress.com/](https://cooperpress.com/)).

How many subscribers do you have?

------
niko001
I run [http://patentsexpiringtoday.com](http://patentsexpiringtoday.com) which
pulls its data from a government API. It's not making any money on its own,
but generates some traffic to my other side projects. It gets about 2-5k
visits per month.

~~~
xcubic
Just curious, where do you get your data?

------
anon1094
IndieHackers was making money from advertising before it was bought by Stripe.

~~~
kristianp
Why would Stripe buy a website like IndieHackers?

~~~
chris11
I think it's just because Stripe has an interest encouraging people to start
side projects/small businesses. It increases their userbase.

~~~
k__
Sounds reasonable, never had thought of this.

