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Originally Posted by Johanka  What if you really aren't that interested in providing value for as many people as possible? Some "kinds of value" (artistic and scholarly work come immediately to mind) just don't get appreciated by enough people to guarantee a solid income if we were to apply Steve's online passive income generation model. You usually need to be backed up by an institution or have a grant to be able to do research full-time, for instance. You can't do it on your own and have enough money to pay the bills, or can you? |
Actually, (according to Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert) what matters is not how many people like it, but
how much those people like it. Dilbert is a case in point: 90% of the people who read it are too young to have worked in a corporate environment, or too old to have worked in today's Hamburger Management corporate environment, or are self-employed, or work for a good corporation, or are too dumb to recognize themselves as the pointy-haired boss. They think this strip is stupid, and can't imagine why anyone would ever read it. But Scott Adams is still filthy rich, because the 10% of people who do read the strip think it is the BEST STRIP EVER CREATED!!!!!!! They read it religiously. They buy Dilbert coffee mugs and Dilbert mints and Dilbert voodoo dolls and Dilbert t-shirts. They write letters to the editor of the local newspaper threatening to lynch them if they don't publish Dilbert in the newspaper. So the Dilbert empire grows.
Actually, stevepavlina.com is another example. As a percentage of the population, there aren't that many people that interested in personal growth. A large number of people come to Steve's website attracted by a title, but decide that Steve's advice is too hard, or that his standards are too high to reach, or that he's a nutbar talking about psychic development. So they never come back.
Those of us that stay, though,
really like the site. We lose days of productivity reading through back articles. We subscribe to the feed. We tell everyone we know to visit the site. So Steve makes a lot of money.
If you want to make an artistic or scholarly website, go for it. You don't have to appeal to a large section of the population. You just have to make sure that the section to whom you do appeal (artists or scholars) get enough value from it to keep coming back.