How to become rich even if nobody is following you on Twitter

Yes, a large portion of the value (for me, at least) is the comments, which are generated by.... us.

That is beyond, and because of, the aggregation. What is created is new and more valuable than the original posts, or even the aggregation thereof.

Agreed - these ideas are not a startup - they don't create real value as a company. However the idea of making passive income is very attractive to many programmers, and creates an opportunity to have time to work on something big.

Those I know revolve around affiliation, alternate search engines, porn/erotic stuff, niche technological forums and such topics :)

Not by him but in the same kind of idea, here's an example:

http://fastpowertools.com/

A while back I know the owner of this site did a few hundreds $ per month. It was really an eye-opener to me :)

Of course this requires SEO skills to earn more than a few bucks, that need to be learn on the way.

I started a couple of sites like this one, and although I earned a bit of money, I wanted to try sites that are really useful to myself, which I'm focusing on now.

I think it's always good to remind myself that between what would look a half-spammy site to a regular programmer, and the typical too complex projects regular programmers would start, there's a sweet spot in the middle.

nope: it's really a mix of affiliate/commissions, regular ads and micropayments (allopass).

Interesting, I've been doing just that for the last couple of years.

It's been a mix of partial successes and total failures, mostly failures. I didn't want to go the 'mfa' route for obvious reasons, so I try to make these sites in to something that actually is useful, and that have a sense of community about them.

Here is a breakdown of what you can make this way in a month based on adsense alone after several years of work, not something to be proud of, that's for sure.

It is very hard to make stuff that does not need maintenance.

   pfn 	        3,203 	        18 	0.56% 	€0.08 	€0.26
   leftsidebar 	68 	        1 	1.47% 	€0.00 	€0.00
   linkbar 	72 	        0 	0.00% 	€0.00 	€0.00
   ccm    	1,012 	        2 	0.20% 	€0.06 	€0.06
   dzleft 	52,480 	        34 	0.06% 	€0.03 	€1.81
   dzlink 	47,804 	        98 	0.21% 	€0.04 	€1.87
   dzmain 	46,950 	        222 	0.47% 	€0.17 	€7.93
   fls 	        90,839 	        459 	0.51% 	€0.50 	€44.98
   gms 	        4,242 	        61 	1.44% 	€0.31 	€1.31
   hst160x600 	30,360 	        54 	0.18% 	€0.20 	€6.13
   hst468x60 	29,992 	        55 	0.18% 	€0.20 	€6.00
   jks 	        359 	        10 	2.79% 	€2.06 	€0.74
   lrmsmall 	90 	        0 	0.00% 	€0.00 	€0.00
   lrmtall 	2,173,823 	2,039 	0.09% 	€0.05 	€112.76
   lrm    	5,209 	        17 	0.33% 	€0.35 	€1.81
   lrmlink 	2,204,212 	2,234 	0.10% 	€0.05 	€115.06
   lrmlinkbar 	24,719 	        109 	0.44% 	€0.15 	€3.64
   mdcl 	84 	        1 	1.19% 	€0.05 	€0.00
   pcs 	        93,418 	        225 	0.24% 	€0.21 	€19.21
   pcslinkbar 	89,701 	        1,206 	1.34% 	€0.43 	€38.88
   stroompunt 	1,039 	        17 	1.64% 	€3.60 	€3.74
   cams   	1,510,897 	5,889 	0.39% 	€0.19 	€289.18
   ztk 	        27,112 	        711 	2.62% 	€3.69 	€100.15
   ztklinkbar 	28,534 	        462 	1.62% 	€1.30 	€37.10

These figures are for the month of January.

I've removed the ones that I consider total failures from this list or it would have been three times as long.

$1 per day per site sounds like a great plan in theory, but in practice it is quite hard to do that across a broad number of sites and not get bogged down in maintenance issues.

Anything with a form will attract spammers more than it will attract users, software will over time stop working because external things it depends on will change and so on.

Passive income is nice, but it is hard to make something that is really passive.

It's not a complete failure, but it definitely wasn't the success I expected either.

This is due to a whole pile of factors, maintenance has already been mentioned, lousy ECPM is another, inability to get any traction with some projects is a third (anybody interested in a complete platform for trading second hand cars or houses ?).