51–60 of 90 posts
This might sound strange, but I don't like the term "passive income". It sounds like a scam. Probably some people actually want a scam, but I think there is a better way of putting it. Profit is roughly "sales - costs". Normally costs are scaled by labour. The higher the volume, the more labour and therefore the higher the costs. You can categorise the shapes of these curves. In a really dysfunctional company, the am…
Another way of stating it is you get paid for bringing value to the marketplace. Creating and delivering value is usually very expensive. There are ways to shift around the creation and distribution of value and there are certain notable edge cases that would allow people to nitpick my definition.
But by and large there is a certain physics to business and you can conceptualize it as having certain conservation laws.
Now if you're looking for the Quantum physics of business where those laws don't seem to hold and seemingly magical shit starts to happen and you discover the superfluid of value creation... Well let me clue you in a little. It's absolutely possible.
However!
The conservation laws still hold as what you're trading off to find this magical superfluid or superconductor of business is a very high search cost to find a viable configuration in which to run your operation. So the search cost to find a new, undiscovered, viable configuration or to find a known viable configuration or to obtain the resources to operationalize a viable configuration that has become known to you is so astronomically high in the worst case that it turns out not to be worth it.
Passive income is very expensive from that stand point.
This might sound strange, but I don't like the term "passive income". It sounds like a scam. Probably some people actually want a scam, but I think there is a better way of putting it. Profit is roughly "sales - costs". Normally costs are scaled by labour. The higher the volume, the more labour and therefore the higher the costs. You can categorise the shapes of these curves. In a really dysfunctional company, the am…
I bought a site last summer that sells YouTube intro videos for $5/$10 a pop: http://introcave.com I made about $13k off it, which sounds good but was really only about $20/hour. Hoping to grow it quite a bit this year and then start offloading tasks. I don’t know if I can ever get it truly passive, but that’s the dream.
Where did you find the site to buy it?
I bought a site last summer that sells YouTube intro videos for $5/$10 a pop: http://introcave.com I made about $13k off it, which sounds good but was really only about $20/hour. Hoping to grow it quite a bit this year and then start offloading tasks. I don’t know if I can ever get it truly passive, but that’s the dream.
I'm not a YouTube creator so not the target market, but this is something I could see myself using if I did create videos. Seems to add good value for the cost, although I don't know what the competition/landscape is like.
Most of the competitors are SAAS and geared at agencies. I’m basically the low end of the market, but YouTubers just starting out don’t need multiple videos for $30/month.
A blog I wrote about 5 years ago on obtaining your licensing as a professional engineer includes affiliate links to a site that sells packages that help with the application process. It's a very niche area but earned me about $5k in 2018 and is what I consider passive income at this point (haven't contributed to the blog in years). That amount was about double 2017, so I'm interested to see how much growth is left.
This might sound strange, but I don't like the term "passive income". It sounds like a scam. Probably some people actually want a scam, but I think there is a better way of putting it. Profit is roughly "sales - costs". Normally costs are scaled by labour. The higher the volume, the more labour and therefore the higher the costs. You can categorise the shapes of these curves. In a really dysfunctional company, the am…
There are some lines of business that really is very passive, but those either don't have much of a moat or competitive advantage and can easily be squashed by something newer, nicer and better.
A blog I wrote about 5 years ago on obtaining your licensing as a professional engineer includes affiliate links to a site that sells packages that help with the application process. It's a very niche area but earned me about $5k in 2018 and is what I consider passive income at this point (haven't contributed to the blog in years). That amount was about double 2017, so I'm interested to see how much growth is left.
Sounds pretty cool and very passive. Do you mind sharing how long it took you build that audience, community and content to reach critical mass?
So to summarize, by far most of my time was spent writing the blog posts and watching my non-existent analytics. Nothing I actively did to market the site (and I did very little) worked. It was a project that didn't intend to make money, that ended up making money.