WRITING ARTICLES FOR AD REVENUE

Publishing articles or blogs to drive ad revenue or commissions.

Good

• Can be decent money per time spent
• Can actually be passive income

Bad

• May require a solid niche, many categories are saturated and are difficult to get traffic, pulling down potential
• The internet is full of articles, and AI is starting to bypass them, creating some uncertainty of if and where writing will perform well long term

Expected Results

• $0 to $400 in a 3 year span per article, with 1-3 hours to put together a decent article, and the occasional 30 minute editing session to update things.

Platforms

• HubPages (Results Below)

There's no shortage of articles on the internet hoping to earn ad or commission revenue, but surprisingly enough, there may be a shortage of articles in some niches. 

I've personally found success writing articles for games that are modestly sizeable but don't have a strong creator presence. As an example, Pokémon has no shortage of content creators and with so much competition it's hard to generate views. But not all topics are like that. If you find one where you can rank well in search because the competition is limited or missing something you can provide, you may be able to generate views and revenue well worth the effort.

This is where it's been very feast or famine for me. Some topics struggled to generate even 1000 views, while others at times could get 1000 views in a day. As mentioned in my results, most of my revenue came from a minority of articles. So if you want results you may need to try your luck for a while to find something that breaks through.

What I liked about HubPages specifically is that it's easy to try articles for different topics without having to re-build an entire website around it. The platform takes its ad revenue cut certainly, but offers a streamline creation process in exchange. If I had to stand up a blog or website to host the articles I wrote, I don't think I would have found the same level of success. It's simple and not particularly robust, but it does allow you to try your hand at writing and make some money on the side if you pull it off. If you really crack something open, at that point maybe it's worth considering your own blog or website.

I would note that HubPages does have limitations on linking websites and there isn't a whole lot you can do to promote yourself as a creator. This isn't super limiting for creating content on their platform and doesn't diminish its effectiveness. However, it does limit your ability to generate traffic external to their platform, and perhaps fairly so.