I had someone in my family ask about this. Asking if there is anything she could do online to supplement her husband's income. She is not someone that has a lot of experience in online spaces. She wouldn't know how to set up a website or start a YouTube channel. Nothing like that. So I am trying to see if there is actually still an option or two out there. I can't think of anything for newbies with little to no experience.

Etsy is a good platform for selling things. Even digital items. A lot of people will sell digital planners, prints, and cards for people to buy and print at home. You sell them cheap enough, you can get some decent earnings coming in. Also looking into print on demand sites that do in-house promotions. So if you post art for printables on the site, they promote it to people browsing it.

23 hours ago, donnie said:

Etsy is a good platform for selling things. Even digital items. A lot of people will sell digital planners, prints, and cards for people to buy and print at home. You sell them cheap enough, you can get some decent earnings coming in. Also looking into print on demand sites that do in-house promotions. So if you post art for printables on the site, they promote it to people browsing it.

I actually was talking to someone recently that sells cards on Etsy. She does print some but mostly offers digital cards. She said she gets 200+ a month in digital sales and the digital prints are all the same price, $1.99 each. So she is making $400 a month in passive income without having to do anything.

Outside of digital "art" sales like selling prints and things like that, e-books do well if you can write and offer something people want to pay for. I have seen people sell e-books via facebook and do well, the topics that do best seem to be health/weight loss and investments. The good thing about e-books is they don't have to be very long and you can price them between $2 and $10 making them more appealing.

Ads still make passive income. It is just a matter of finding the best platform for them. You need to build up traffic whether it is for an app, site, youtube channel, etc.

But they don't pay as well as they once did.

There is always going to be avenues of passive income online. It is just a matter of finding what works and what you are most interested in. If you don't like what you do, no amount of possible profits will keep you perusing it. You will become bored of it and abandon it.

On 8/3/2026 at 9:12 AM, jonasb23 said:

Ads still make passive income. It is just a matter of finding the best platform for them. You need to build up traffic whether it is for an app, site, youtube channel, etc.

But they don't pay as well as they once did.

The issue with doing this for a website is if you aren't actually selling something, traffic matters a lot more for passive income and you have to compete with information hubs like Reddit which AI seems to prioritize. That and a lot of people are using AI instead of google to do basic searches now.

On 8/13/2026 at 10:14 AM, Ryyyan said:

The issue with doing this for a website is if you aren't actually selling something, traffic matters a lot more for passive income and you have to compete with information hubs like Reddit which AI seems to prioritize. That and a lot of people are using AI instead of google to do basic searches now.

This is true. Selling something is always best but when you rely on ads alone, it is alot harder to make good passive income. Not impossible, but just takes double what it did for the same payout just 10 years ago.

On 8/21/2026 at 11:34 AM, jonasb23 said:

This is true. Selling something is always best but when you rely on ads alone, it is alot harder to make good passive income. Not impossible, but just takes double what it did for the same payout just 10 years ago.

What causes ad revenue to dip or be worth less? That is what I can't understand. Like ads paid more back in 2016 even though more people use the internet today than they did back then, especially after covid.

On 8/31/2026 at 10:32 AM, Ryyyan said:

What causes ad revenue to dip or be worth less? That is what I can't understand. Like ads paid more back in 2016 even though more people use the internet today than they did back then, especially after covid.

The value dropped because companies realized they were spending money on ads that were being shown to bots. It has dropped again because of AI. There were other factors too like inflated traffic, fake stats, etc. that were all being manipulated.

I don't know about passive per-say but there are ways of making money still online.

Something that is making good money for people is using AI to make videos for companies, pod-casters, etc.. So think short form videos with text, flashy changes, etc. and with AI anyone can pick this up and learn it now easily.

On 9/8/2026 at 8:47 AM, jonasb23 said:

The value dropped because companies realized they were spending money on ads that were being shown to bots. It has dropped again because of AI. There were other factors too like inflated traffic, fake stats, etc. that were all being manipulated.

Oh right okay, well I guess this makes sense then. I keep seeing people talk about how no one is watching anything anymore. Sports, movies, etc. but that Spiderman movie that came out not that long ago did just fine. So I am not sure what people are talking about.

On 9/17/2026 at 9:53 AM, Ryyyan said:

Oh right okay, well I guess this makes sense then. I keep seeing people talk about how no one is watching anything anymore. Sports, movies, etc. but that Spiderman movie that came out not that long ago did just fine. So I am not sure what people are talking about.

The viewership of things is down because of streaming platforms. Also, things like sports have been in a decline for years. I think this is because the big ones in the US got too political. I know a number of people that stopped watching the NFL over politics. They never went back to watching it either.

If you can get a decent amount of traffic to any site, ads will still make you money. If you can do this a handful of times, you could easily earn a living.

I knew someone from a previous forum that ran 6 blogs. He was earning an average of $5,000 a month (closer to $8,000 during peak holiday season) and it was all from ads.

On 9/27/2026 at 11:50 AM, justdave said:

I knew someone from a previous forum that ran 6 blogs. He was earning an average of $5,000 a month (closer to $8,000 during peak holiday season) and it was all from ads.

I am guessing he is not earning this much anymore?

From what I have seen, ad sales and promotions are down for everyone. I know someone that earns via ads and his revenue had been cut in half despite the traffic remaining the same.