Who is earning passive income, what niches are they in and how do they generate revenue?

Before we jump into this, let’s ask the most important question…where do the numbers come from?

I’ve sourced pretty much every number straight from the horses mouth…ie the person’s own website.  If you click on any name it will take you to the exact page where the numbers come from.

With the sites that were involved in the Million Dollar Blog Project – and have thus had their numbers taken from there – I had to do a bit of a rough calculation, whereby I just divided their total reported earnings by 12 months (about how long I think the project ran for).

If anyone sees a mistake in my numbers, please get in touch and I’ll fix it up ASAP.

The numbers revealed

PS in all honesty not all of these sites were great ideas. I think these would be much better (and bonus…they have nothing to do with MMO!)

What counts as income?

Well, first of all, the amounts above are all monthly income figures.

And I was pretty strict on only counting income earned from passive sources, eg affiliate marketing, info products, etc.  That means I did not count any active income earned and detailed in anyone’s monthly income report, eg income from consulting.

One tough thing though was income v net income.  I’ve gone with income (gross), because half the sites don’t list expenses and also many people’s expenses aren’t directly related to their income.  So to make comparison as smooth as possible I’ve gone this way.

One thing to mention there, is where I saw someone making a material amount from Amazon’s affiliate program, and they listed their ‘revenue’, I’ve assumed this is Amazon sales and thus their actual income was 10% of that.

PS I didn’t count passive income from things like stocks, ie dividends.  This is because no actual work/entrepreneurship goes into that, and thus there is less for us to learn from these examples.

Can you explain the income streams more?

So we have the obvious info products, affiliate marketing and adsense dominating for most people.

I listed adsense even where people were using some other form of PPC program, in order to keep the list comparable once again.

If the person earned less than about $50 from an income stream I generally didn’t include it, since we have serious space limitations with this table.

How come almost half of the people are in the MMO niche?

Yeah, it’s hard to avoid, because the people most likely to publicly report their online income tend to have blogs dedicated to teaching people how to MMO.

Oh yeah, for those of you not familiar with it, MMO means make money online.

Don’t take this domination as proof positive that the only way to make money online is through teaching other people how to make money online!

In fact, I’ll be co-launching a new site soon that will show you how I go about earning passive income online, from scratch, in niches that have nothing to do with MMO.  (This will of course be insanely helpful and inspirational to those of you jaded by the number of MMO peeps out there!)

PS If you want to be one of the first to get notified about this new site, simply sign up for our email list here >

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