
If You’re Passionate About Something, You Can Make a Living From It Online - ryanwaggoner
http://ryanwaggoner.com/2010/02/if-youre-passionate-about-something-you-can-make-a-living-from-it-online/
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MicahWedemeyer
I'll jump in here, since I'm busy monetizing a niche community.

I run <http://www.obsidianportal.com>, and we're just turning 3 years old. I
won't give stats on users, uniques, etc, since we keep that close to the vest.
However, we do have over 10k RPG campaigns registered, and about 250k pages of
content.

Most important, we're actually decently profitable, after 3 hard years. Still
not ramen profitable, but it will provide a nice chunk of change this year. If
our growth continues, I may be able to support myself full time in another 2-3
years, but I'm trying not to be too optimistic.

Before someone says, "You can make money off your passion" or "Do what you
love and money will follow", I'd like to see their own personal evidence. I'm
walking that road and I know how hard it is. Possible? Yes. But definitely not
easy, and it takes waaay more than just passion. It takes late nights, hard
work, thick skin, and a good bit of luck. Oh, and forget about "fail fast." If
you do what you love, be prepared for a long, hard slog up the mountain to
profitability. I love my community and my chosen subject matter, but it's
still _work_ and it's still _hard_.

To the OP: Can you point to a community/passion that you've personally
monetized _into a living_? Maybe it's too much to ask that someone be a
personal expert on everything, but being in that boat myself, I get a little
irritated when someone breaks out the "Do what you love" line without backing
it up with personal experience. That's not to say that the OP hasn't done it,
just that I didn't see any evidence in my cursory glance over the blog.

One last bit of advice: All our success is due to charging subscriptions.
Forget ads. They suck. Besides being crazy variable, they also annoy your
users. Find a way to charge money for something. No, you'll never get as big
as Facebook or Twitter that way, but that doesn't matter. You'll never get as
big as Facebook or Twitter anyway, so don't even try to walk that road.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
_Before someone says, "You can make money off your passion" or "Do what you
love and money will follow", I'd like to see their own personal evidence. I'm
walking that road and I know how hard it is. Possible? Yes. But definitely not
easy, and it takes waaay more than just passion. It takes late nights, hard
work, thick skin, and a good bit of luck. Oh, and forget about "fail fast." If
you do what you love, be prepared for a long, hard slog up the mountain to
profitability. I love my community and my chosen subject matter, but it's
still work and it's still hard._

I apologize if my post was irritating to you, and you're right that I didn't
elaborate on how difficult this can be, but my point wasn't that it's easy,
just that it's almost certainly possible if you're willing to put in the work.
And if you're passionate about it and you enjoy it overall, what do you have
to lose? Your story is a pretty good illustration of what I'm talking about.

And no, I'm not quite to the "making a living" point with the niches I'm
monetizing (though I know others who are), though I think I will be in the
next 12-18 months, assuming growth continues as it has been. I also don't put
as much time and effort into them as I could/should, primarily because of my
startup.

~~~
MicahWedemeyer
Congrats on your success, then. 18 months away from making a living is a great
place to be. Assuming it's web based, do you have links to the
sites/projects/whatever? I'm curious to see, and I always try to pick up ideas
from others.

~~~
kimfuh
I'll send you a link when we're set to launch.

------
jdietrich
Forums _in themselves_ don't make any money. Access to a big, active,
interested market is worth an absolute fortune if you have the Direct
Marketing expertise, but most forum owners don't. There's a reason why all
successful print magazines have teams of advertising salespeople. Advertising
is still a relationship business, especially when dealing with niches.

Do you know why you get an inflight magazine on a plane? Because it's hugely
profitable for the airline. They are prepared to pay big chunks of money to
writers, photographers, designers and printers just to be able to sell ads
targeted at the niche of "people on planes". How lucrative do you imagine a
super-targeted forum might be when monetised properly?

Direct Marketers treat mailing lists as a saleable commodity. A relatively
cheap mailing list costs $50 per thousand names per mailing. A high quality
list for a suitably lucrative niche list could sell for ten times that.
Sponsorship of a regular newsletter with good readership could be worth even
more if sold properly, likewise sponsored subforums.

That's the simple stuff, the things proper businesses do when they have a huge
list of people who like to buy the same stuff. Today though, the sky is the
bloody limit. I feel all tingly in my private area when I think of the
Customer Development possibilities for someone who has a trust relationship
and constant two-way communication with that many prospective customers.

A forum is a publishing business, potentially a highly lucrative one. It's not
going to monetise itself. If you don't have the skills and aren't ready to
learn them, you need to bring in people who do.

------
vaksel
forums don't make any money.

I know a guy who runs a very successful forum...#1 forum for a particular car
niche...has 110K registered users, and about 50K uniques a month, and 1
million page views.

Know how much he makes? $2,500 a month. $500 from Adsense, $1000 from selling
car parts, and $1000 from direct advertising sales.

$2,500 is not bad, until you throw in the cost of servers and
bandwidth....after all is said and done, at the end of the month he clears
about $600.

Sure $600 is nothing to sniff at, but he's been running the forum for 10 years
now....so you would think at that level it'd be making a ton more money than
that.

~~~
javery
Servers and Bandwidth for a site doing 1 million page views a month should
cost at most a couple hundred bucks, maybe $500 if you go overboard. If he is
spending $1900 a month on servers that is ridiculous.

~~~
vaksel
he has a lot of regulars. Gets something like 2,000-3,000 people on at the
same time every night + it's an old site, so there are a ton of threads, I
think something like 2 million at this point.

Infrastructure wise, I know that he has 4 web servers, 2 DB servers, and 1
image server...I'm not certain on specs, but I believe all of them are dual
xeons.

But yeah it's pretty crazy, since it's a hobby, I'm sure he is getting things
that he doesn't really need.

------
dangrossman
I disagree with his assumption that these forums, let alone _every_ forum of
similar size, earn enough to "make a living" from. Forums are notoriously hard
to monetize, and traffic at those levels is likely to bring in at most a few
hundred a month in advertising and affiliate revenue. That's not enough for a
young single guy to live off, let alone a family.

~~~
zzzmarcus
It's true that forums are hard to monetize with Adsense and other affiliate
ads, but they're definitely not impossible to monetize.

I started/ran silverfishlongboarding.com for a few years and the forums became
very popular. Even so, it never made more than a couple hundred a month off
Adsense.

Eventually we got rid of Adsense and started selling ads directly. Within a
few months we were bringing in several thousand a month. It was much more time
consuming, but it worked. I sold the site a couple years ago, but I keep in
touch with the new owners and I know that at least one of them is making a
living full time off it.

~~~
Nwallins
Wow, I used to surf the 'fish a good bit last year. Got hooked up with the
Friday Night Rip at Prospect Park with the Earthwing and Bustin crews, bought
a Kracked Skulls M1; my roommate bought an Original Apex. It's still a great
site with a valuable community. Nice work!

------
ashishbharthi
I like how HN readers take a blog post, tear it apart word by word and make
really healthy discussion out of it.

I tried a forum thing 2-3 years back with help of few friends, but with ad
sense couldn't even pay for hosting fees. Had to shut it down.

------
GHFigs
_Now, I don’t know how much money these sites are making...[but]...I’m
convinced you could make a good living in these niches._

~~~
ryanwaggoner
How competent the owners of these sites might be in monetization is
irrelevant, as my point is that the audiences in question are sufficiently
engaged and passionate to be willing to pay for stuff, and thus it's
_possible_ to make a good living from them.

------
coriander
An audience != A business

~~~
jasongullickson
It does in showbusiness.

~~~
dabent
You know, I'm watching a show about a wedding cake contest in Oklahoma right
now. If Food network can make money on that, there's got to be a way to do it
online.

I think we're just getting started in our ways of monetizing audiences online.
Just look at the reality TV shows that make money on the most obscure topics
these days.

~~~
pyre
I think that the advertisers pay more for Food network airtime because Food
network has repeat patrons. It's a little different for a one-off show than
for an entire network.

------
proexploit
My 2(-4) Cents (per click):* Most of these posts mention Adsense when they
explain why they don't make a whole lot of money. Adsense is not very
effective in many niches (for example, "funny stories" would only get you
roughly 2-4 cents per click). Sure, you can't all start a forum about
Mesothelioma Lawyers, but you can seek more intuitive, less hated methods of
generating profit than Adsense.

*I'm so sorry for that intro, I just had to do it :)

------
brlewis
Upvoted because I hope it's true.

~~~
michael_dorfman
Hope is not a strategy.

~~~
brlewis
Hope, by itself, is not a strategy.

~~~
proexploit
Hope, by itself, encourages inaction.

~~~
cubicle67
Despair, by itself, encourages inaction

Hope is a fantastic motivator

~~~
proexploit
I know this is a pointless tangent we're off on, but "hope" is a particular
pet peeve of mine. Hope is not a motivator. In a lot of cases, when we hope
something changes, we don't spend very much time trying to change it. For
example, I could hope that "Mr. X" becomes mayor or I could go out and canvas
the neighborhood, put out flyers, etc. Of course, with most action, you will
also hope for a positive outcome, but hope alone is not a motivator, and hope
ALONE, encourages inaction.

Despair is honestly more of a motivator than hope is. How many times have
people been in a terrible situation and forced to work extra hard to create a
better outcome. Yes, despair is not a positive feeling, but hope isn't all
it's cracked up to be either. I'm not a pessimist, and there are times when
hope is appropriate, e.g. when things are out of your control.

~~~
cubicle67
thanks for the explanation. Looks like we might have different meanings behind
'hope' here. I tend to think of it less in the way you describe here, and more
like a vision of something I think is possible; hope is something that helps
galvanise action.

eg, I hope to see my kids grow up with a reasonable level of immunity to
brand-names, therefore, when we buy things we talk about things like what it's
made of, how well will it suit our needs, how long do we expect it to last
etc, and almost never mention what brand it is.

------
bravura
Can anyone propose any _automated techniques_ for discovering or sifting
through potential niche communities, to figure out which can be monetized?

