Ask HN: Your Passive Income Suggestions?

This is US centric, but the approach I've had good success with is outlined at: https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Bogleheads%C2%AE_investment_....

This is essentially what Personal Capital, Wealthfront, Betterment, etc., do for you. I don't use those services because I enjoy learning about personal finance and I think the work required on my part is pretty easy. Your mileage may vary.

Here's my experiences for last year in passive income:

Total Gross Revenues: $20,000 or so.

Mostly from a single high-traffic niche site which I promote almost exclusively through social media. My site offers a free version of what a few other websites in the same niche offer as a SaaS service.

From that same site, most of the revenue (~80%) is from ads (ad revenue increased when switching to responsive units). Next, Amazon associate makes up about 15% of the revenue. And about 5% from donations.

The downside is that ad rates are DROPPING pretty quickly, ad-block usage rates are increasing rapidly, some browsers block ads by default now, etc. So I'm trying to get off of ad dependency.

I'm thinking in the future a Patreon funded project or project with additional SaaS component will probably fare better if you traffic is at least medium size (~50k/mo+), and comprised of repeat visitors.

I also have eBooks, which despite the rapid increase in popularity of Amazon authors, seem to be doing well. My most popular eBook is bringing in ~40$ / mo on the 35% plan (I can't use the 70% plan because someone stole it and uploaded it elsewhere). The rest of my eBooks are bringing in ~$20 total. If you have expertise, and strong communication skills - eBooks may be a good route to go down. Leanpub offers higher % rate, and I've seen some technical authors make a killing there - might be a better option.

As far as stocks go, I'm all invested in Vanguard which seems to like tech stocks - so not so great this year. The high-dividend yield funds are probably the way to go in 2016 since growth growth isn't so hot right now.

I would stay away from IoS & Android because app discovery is messed up, and you need a marketing budget in most scenarios to make it big.

Default rates on Lending Club are high enough you get ~33% of the quoted interest rate due to defaults.

I'm interested in your path to the free SaaS tool. Do you think it would be viable to outsource the creation of tools to compete with popular, paid ones, offer the outsourced tool for free, and rake in ad-revenue/e-book sales? With proper marketing and seo a person could probably break even within a few months.

Is that anything like what you did?

Bitcoin arbitrage.