Today, I want to tackle a question I think about all the time:
Is this the most difficult time to “make money online” since the inception of the Internet?
Or are we actually just early to what’s next? And what actually is next?
I’ve broken it down into two parts, both of which are in this article.
Part One: A Babel Of Our Making
First, here are the multitude of (sometimes ridiculous) ways I’ve made money online. I promise this isn’t a brag and is important to the greater point:
- 2005: Sites covering niche products (stair parts, grab bars, etc) that ranked in Google because no competition existed
- 2006-2008: Curated video sites covering anything from humor to fights and accidents
- 2006-2007: A website to go download graphics and art for your MySpace profile
- 2009: A celebrity gossip site I purchased and ran
- 2009: A text-based game that only around 100 people played but brought in good revenue
- 2009-2010: Sites that hosted famous quotes and Bible verses, shared endlessly on Facebook
- 2010-2012: GodVine, a natural extension of the prior ones – hundreds of millions of Facebook views and 750,000 newsletter subscribers
- 2013-2015: ViralNova, a mainstream version of GodVine, receiving billions of Facebook visits in a one year period
- 2016-2019: OnlyInYourState, a travel site that had 1 million newsletter subscribers, 100k daily Google visits, and 300k daily Facebook visits when I sold it
- 2019-Present: Passive ownership of web properties and public companies
There are probably some that I’m forgetting, and there are definitely failures mixed in between all of them. But that’s the thing…
I’m probably forgetting some because there have always been so many ways to make money with a website.
For example, while running the site I’m most well known for, Viral Nova, I knew thousands and thousands of people were making insane money with Google traffic, even Pinterest traffic.
But I didn’t care. Viral Nova was crushing it on Facebook, and there was no way to clone myself to try all the other potential business ideas going through my head. So I just stuck to the avenue that was working.
My point here is that, since I started building sites in 2005, there have always been multiple clear paths to succeeding with a website.
You just had to be disciplined, savvy, and fast-moving.
But now, for the first time, things feel different.
Don’t get me wrong – I am well aware people are still crushing it online.
But who, exactly, are they?
It seems to primarily be people who have sacrificed their souls to the Internet – influencers, fake gurus, streamers.
People who have voluntarily discarded a huge part of their humanity in return for taking money from the hopeless and the desperate, implicitly or explicitly.
Not the quiet, business savvy person who was finally given a medium to thrive without being a good bullshitter salesperson and networker.
Are those days ending? Are they over?
Do we have to launch AI-powered dog walking and convince investors that it’s the next big thing?
Do we have to pretend that each of thousands of individuals are special to us so they pay $5/mo?
Are we all just going to be coaches, so that coaches are coaching other coaches to coach?
Even if so, all of that is also on borrowed time.
I don’t blame anyone for taking advantage of short term windows of opportunity (guilty), but none of that is sustainable.
The flood of humans longing to be influencers already made it extremely difficult on every platform, but now the literal endless spigot of AI slop is putting the nail in the coffin.
(More on that in a minute.)
So… where is real money being made?
Well, here’s one place:
And here:
And here:
And definitely here:
I’ve never complained about corporations making money, and I’m not going to now. I’m even invested in all of these companies myself, both as a shareholder and user of their products.
But so much money is flowing to the top right now that it’s impossible to ignore.
Simultaneously, small and medium sized businesses are being squeezed out, forced to continuously chase the carrot Big Tech dangles in front of them all the while stealing their soul (and work).
It just begs an honest reflection on the original question: can an individual still start a website and make money from it?
The answer is yes, but the way to do it is not nearly as clear as it used to be during the pre-ChatGPT era. The balanced era where everybody in the delicate ecosystem was winning, as long as they did things really well.
So, where am I going with all of this?
Like I wrote extensively in my last article, a new future is coming – and I think it looks different but brighter.
When I look around at the current state of things, it’s so clearly transitional.
I mostly look at the indisputable reality that AI slop is going to change everything because it’s inundating Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Spotify, TikTok, Reddit, X, and every other massive company that’s currently thriving from a market cap standpoint.
It’s their platform-eating cancer.
AI slop has become a relentless, careless flood of infinite websites, music tracks, TikToks, YouTube videos, posts, and comments.
What tends to happen when anything is flooded?
Things overflow, things break. Things get washed away, people get hurt.
But what emerges is often beautiful: humans helping humans and a rebuilding that’s better and stronger than it ever was before.
While we may be living through perhaps the worst time to be an individual or small team trying to build something profitable, sustainable, and perhaps even life-changing on the Internet, floods tend to happen fast.
Rebuilding takes longer. But in rebuilding, businesses thrive and new wealth is created.
Lessons are learned. And people move on, but they don’t forget.
So let the AI slop wash away this pitiful existence of the Internet, and let’s prepare for the next one.
Part Two: Nothing New Under The Sun
While not a great parallel, I actually am reminded of when the 2008 financial crisis blew up the greater economy.
Not because AI reminds me of the subprime loan fiasco, but because I had just started doing pretty well online the year before – and then saw RPMs from ad networks absolutely plummet.
Nobody had any money or at least they weren’t spending it if they did. It impacted everybody as many of you will remember.
So it left me with one choice: be a lot better.
Some of the greatest inventions, breakthroughs, and even entire businesses came from someone having their back to the wall.
Take the story of LEGO.
When video games became popular through the 90s, LEGO started pivoting to flashier toys and electronics, completely getting away from their core product, in an attempt to compete with newer, “more exciting” toys.
The result was ultimately $800 million in debt and on the verge of bankruptcy until 36 year old incoming CEO, Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, came along with a simple plan:
Get back to the basics.
He cut the number of pieces being manufactured in half and – I’m oversimplifying here – essentially optimized everything around the original core product.
The result, as you probably know, has been one of the greatest turnarounds in the history of business.
They even quadrupled profits during the 2008 financial crisis.
Last year, they brought in $11 billion in revenue with a profit of more than $2 billion. Not bad for a company seemingly destined for eternal obsolescence.
Not bad for a simple, literal block.
Right now, business online feels a lot like what LEGO must’ve been feeling in the 90s.
A new wave of technology comes along, and everyone seems to flock to it like vultures to fresh roadkill. Everyone’s talking about it, using it, and building with it. You can’t look at your phone or even turn on the TV without hearing about it.
It makes you feel like you’re falling behind, missing out, or probably both. So you jump on the trend too and try to take advantage of the wave like everyone else seems to be doing.
You get away from what actual business even is: delivering undeniable value in return for money.
Instead, you start making decisions based on hype, fear, and emotion rather than to make your customers happier.
Like LEGO in the 90s, you start chasing trends as if suddenly everyone stopped wanting what made those little foot-destroying blocks so special in the first place.
Human desire has remained stable for thousands of years.
When it comes to artificial intelligence, it’s not our savior nor is it our enemy. It just is.
Right now, it’s primarily generative AI that has captivated the entire business world and deluded us into somehow thinking basic human behavior and business have changed.
Companies are shoving AI in their products like passenger pushers in a Tokyo subway.
I can’t go to any website anymore without seeing “AI-powered,” and I can’t for the life of me figure out why this is supposed to be a good thing.
Who are they talking to?
Really, I genuinely cannot understand how the digital business world collectively lost its mind and decided “AI-powered” is a selling point outside of specific B2B companies:
- Gen AI, by all accounts, is mediocre when it comes to creating anything new. This isn’t an opinion; the actual technology by its very nature leads to average output.
- Every day consumers do not see “AI-powered” and think, “Wow! I’m super pumped this product has code, prompts, and automation behind it!” Nobody is buying something merely because it’s AI-powered.
- Even when it actually is a benefit, it’s now nauseating. It no longer means anything because the tribal yell is saturated.
- Simply put, who cares if it’s AI-powered? In the past, we never plastered everywhere that we were intern-powered, freelance-powered, or coffee-powered.
Though, ironically, the latter would resonate inifinitely better with most consumers.
While this has been a digression from my main point, it’s an important one.
AI is dramatically overhyped, but also impressive. Both things can be true.
I’m excited by the possibility of future versions of generative AI advancing healthcare and education beyond anything we ever imagined. But when that eventually happens, I don’t want to be told that my surgery is AI-powered.
I just want it to save my life.
Reeling things in… part one of this article was about how we seem to be living in the toughest era to build success online. And part two shows us why:
The entire digital landscape has become LEGO of the 90s, chasing flash and magic out of hype and fomo. This not only includes, but is led by, the big technology platforms hellbent on not being left behind in a confusing, expensive war toward something nobody even asked for or truly identify.
And, like most wars, we’re all affected more than those declaring it.
In wrapping this article up, most importantly, I want to say this isn’t actually supposed to be pessimistic. The opposite in fact. I’ve lived through every major wave of the Internet and found ways to make money in all of them.
And the toughest time periods always eventually resulted in the biggest breakthroughs. Breakthroughs that, like LEGO, often came from simply getting back to the basics.
I’ve written about this several times before, but in 2012, the entire media industry declared that Email is dead. Millennials supposedly no longer opened emails, and the future was supposedly reaching them on Snapchat and whatever else seemed cool.
Meanwhile, I had two newsletters, one with 750,000 subscribers and one with 100,000. More than a decade later, everyone is chasing newsletters to finally “own your audience.”
They’re getting back to the basics.
What I’d love for you to take away from that example has nothing to do with me. It’s that the industry gets it wrong a lot. The hive mind is a powerful, dangerous, and often stupid thing.
When you truly realize that and stay outside of it, you can focus on making decisions that improve your business, make users happier, and keep your mind open enough to spot what really works.
Some of those decisions may utilize AI, and some may not. It doesn’t matter because AI isn’t the real story.
We are… and always will be.
