I don't understand how people monetize hobbies. For me a hobby could be a very niche thing that only interests me and maybe a dozen people in the world. Hard to monetize that.
Monetizing hobbies
31–40 of 98 posts
Re: Monetizing hobbies
#32One key point here is how comfortable you are with pressure and deadlines. Hobbies don't have deadlines but clients/users/stakeholders do. No matter what value you provide the hobby-centric approach of doing it on your own time, own pace might not work out.
Re: Monetizing hobbies
#33I've monetised my hobbies three times so far. All three times it has become lucrative, but none of them are hobbies any more. One of the important things along the way I've learned is that what makes hobbies relaxing and fun isn't about the specific task you're doing but the fact that it's about enjoying the process of making/doing rather than feeling pressure to deliver the end result. That's not to say I have any r…
> All three times it has become lucrative, but none of them are hobbies any more. I regularly wonder how to balance the intrinsic pleasure with extrinsic value. I keep thinking that people could meet on the point where both find great pleasure in this venture. Something rare in the current economy it seems.
It's hard because extrinsic motivation kills intrinsic motivation (see Drive for some of the behavioural science here). Once you start putting a monetary reward on things, people in general lose the interest in doing them for their own sake.
So I think for this to work, you have to go full collectivist: gather up a bunch of people interested in different things, produce stuff for each other and divide equally with no money being involved in the transaction.
Re: Monetizing hobbies
#34Ah, the old phrase "my avocation is my vocation"
I'm very blessed to be able to tell people this. When I was growing up, my grandmother had a radio scanner in her small town Virginia home, and I was fascinated that you could listen in on what the police and fire departments were doing on a daily basis. My parents bought me a radio scanner a few years later and as a young boy I followed the rabbit hole of radio communications, scanners, and listening in to police, fire, aircraft, amateur radio etc.
Fast forward many years: I'm well established in a career as an IBM System Engineer, and during my downtime in the 90's, I thought it would be really neat if, instead of purchasing books with radio frequencies, it would be pretty cool if you could search on the WWW for this data. This was back in the day when this data was just starting to be made available on dial-up BBSs, but this new WWW thing was becoming more and more popular.
Mind you, I still pursued my hobby of radios and scanners, and had lots of expensive equipment to listen to everything around me. All the while taking multiple conference calls with IBM customers and generally doing my "day" job from home.
So, one week I sat down and taught myself Perl and MySQL. Created an online database, solicited people over Usenet to submit data to the new site, and RadioReference.com was born.
Fast forward to today. RadioReference.com is my avocation and vocation, I get to stay home and develop and manage my business which is also my hobby. And we did some amazing innovation which resulted in Broadcastify.com, which allows you to listen to police scanners all over the world without ever having to buy a complex radio.
So, yes, you can monetize your hobby, and this article really resonates. I never made it about the money, but my business is wildly successful and I can definitely tell you that I am living the dream :)
Re: Monetizing hobbies
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Old people rock! Not all of us. I do understand some of the animosity, but it is very self-destructive; especially when I see some of these Jurassic-scale crash-and-burn disasters that were entirely avoidable, if only one single person in authority had been out of school for more than ten years. I also have participated in a Service organization (nonprofit) for most of my life, and a lot of the work that I do is ba…
Oops, for some reason I thought you were volunteering to help older folks, hence my comment (expressing I am a fan of the older cohort, as they carry much wisdom & grace). Didn't mean to express the opposite! Just to level the playing field, I've participated in orgs with "younger" leadership and have been burned, and also made my errors from my own arrogance/ lack of experience. The "good" that came out of that was…
What amused me, the most (except it wasn't really amusing, at the time. Looking back, I'm ROTFLMAO), was the recruiters.
I have a pretty heavy-duty résumé. I've been shipping (not just "writing") software for over thirty-five years, and have a fairly big portfolio (that really only covers the last ten years of my work, and just the open-source portion of it). I've written APIs that have lasted 25 years. I do good work, and can prove it.
They would contact me, breathless and excited by my CV, then ghost me, as soon as they figured out that I was over 40.
I guess that math isn't a big requirement to be a recruiter. The industry must be awash in 30-year-olds with 35 years of experience.
These days, I just make it clear that I'm older, and they stopped bothering me.
Re: Monetizing hobbies
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
> All three times it has become lucrative, but none of them are hobbies any more. I regularly wonder how to balance the intrinsic pleasure with extrinsic value. I keep thinking that people could meet on the point where both find great pleasure in this venture. Something rare in the current economy it seems.
One way to do it have the hobby be something that’s entirely yours (you carve intricate models of Vietnamese railway cays say) and someone else sells them, almost without any communication as to “what is selling etc”. Never take orders.
kinda like agents and artists ?
Re: Monetizing hobbies
#37I don't understand how people monetize hobbies. For me a hobby could be a very niche thing that only interests me and maybe a dozen people in the world. Hard to monetize that.
Why so obscure?
Re: Monetizing hobbies
#38My wife and I were feeling cooped up from Covid so we started a new hobby - storage auctions. We buy abandoned storage units at auction, sell the things, keep (very very rarely) any upgrades or things we want, and move to the next.
Its still a hobby, but we are now optimizing for cash / time spent / ease of flip so I think its at the cusp of moving away from hobby.
Re: Monetizing hobbies
#39The author mentions bike repair as a hobby, and the issue with trying to turn that into a monetized hobby will quickly become apparent once you talk to some experienced full-time bike mechanics. As a hobbyist your scope is almost always rather narrow, i.e. you may know all about how to repair your particular model of bicycle, and perhaps a few others. In contrast a professional will deal with dozens of models and will also know who to contact for specialty jobs (some of the early suspension bicycles, for example, require highly specialized tools that only a few mechanics own and which are no longer produced).
It is sometimes possible that a hobbyist can find an entry point to the professional world. Building wheels is something I've recently been learning, but there are a lot of people who've been doing that for over a decade and they can probably build a wheel in 1/10th the time it would take me. Given the supply chain backups and the scarcity of bike parts today, however, there might be a little niche there.
Point being, the leap from hobbyist to professional in any area can be a lot larger than it appears at first glance.
Re: Monetizing hobbies
#40There's an old saying in ham radio. "If you want to make a small fortune in ham radio, start with a large fortune".
Also racing cars. Boats have a lot of similar aphorisms, too.