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'm wondering if anyone is making substantial money from a site that just generates content (and isn't selling a service/product) ?
(Looking for examples of people doing this on their own, not big companies running news/content sites)
I wrote a semi-popular blog for a couple years as I was coming up in the advertising agency world as a digital strategist.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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).
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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).<p>I think content sites are good MVP's, but to be defensible need to be turned into something more valuable.
You could go browse Patreon. <i>Questionable Content</i> 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. <i>Girls with Slingshots</i> is another webcomic supporting its author.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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.
I run <a href="https://officesnapshots.com" rel="nofollow">https://officesnapshots.com</a> --<p>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.<p>Been running it for just over 10 years and it has been my full-time work for the last ~5.
As a learning experiment, I tried my hand at an amazon affiliate site <a href="http://nextlesson.com" rel="nofollow">http://nextlesson.com</a> , but it ended up only making 67 cents. I might change the site in the future to focus more on young learning.<p>I have been channeling my efforts into my food side project <a href="https://bestfoodnearme.com" rel="nofollow">https://bestfoodnearme.com</a> 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.
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 <a href="http://toptalkedbooks.com" rel="nofollow">http://toptalkedbooks.com</a>, 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.
I curate a daily list of interesting engineering blogs at <a href="https://discoverdev.io" rel="nofollow">https://discoverdev.io</a><p>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!
I run <a href="http://patentsexpiringtoday.com" rel="nofollow">http://patentsexpiringtoday.com</a> 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.