We publish in four areas. Each is somewhere people lose money or time and where the free advice available is either wrong or paid for by someone.
How the money works#
Eight routes to online income, all assessed the same way: what they pay, what you need before starting, how long until the first payment, who they suit, who they don’t, and what changed this year.
Covering all eight in one place is the point. Hardly anyone needs a guide to “making money online” in the abstract. What helps is seeing that selling a skill pays in the first week while platform advertising pays somewhere around month nine, and choosing on that basis.
Getting found#
Ask creators what their biggest problem is and between 54% and 60% say it is getting their work seen, ahead of money. That got harder in a structural way during 2026: about 68% of Google searches now end without anyone clicking through, and referral traffic to publishers has fallen sharply.
Most of the advice on this subject was written for a version of search that no longer operates. We cover what replaced it, including how to end up cited inside AI-generated answers, and why direct channels stopped being a nice-to-have.
Keeping what you’ve earned#
This is where a single mistake costs the most and where plain explanations are hardest to find. Every large platform rewrote its monetisation rules during 2026, mostly to exclude mass-produced content. Declaring AI use became a legal obligation in the EU on 2 August 2026 rather than a platform preference. Brand contracts routinely contain usage-rights clauses worth more than the fee attached to them.
We translate the rules into what they mean for your income, with dates and links to the originals, so you can check it yourself.
Making it survivable#
Somewhere between 62% and 90% of creators report burnout, depending on which survey you read. When people rank the causes by severity, the top answer isn’t screen time or workload. It’s financial instability, at 55%. For most people, then, the fix is a steadier income structure and not a better morning routine.
So we write about runway, pricing, irregular income and tax, alongside what this work does to people.
Money basics and burnout and income
Calculators#
Two, both built on the same benchmark figures we cite elsewhere.
- Income targets works out how many views, subscribers, clients or sales you need for a given monthly figure.
- Rate calculator prices a brand deal or freelance job, with usage rights and exclusivity included.
What we don’t do#
We don’t recommend tools. Tool recommendations are the most compromised genre in this field because that’s where the affiliate money sits. Where naming a tool is unavoidable we name it, without a referral link.
We don’t teach tactics. They have a shelf life of months and are the easiest thing to get wrong in public. Structure, rules and economics move more slowly and matter more.
We don’t give legal, tax or financial advice. We explain which rules exist and point you at the text. For anything specific to your circumstances you need a qualified professional in your own jurisdiction, and we’ll say so rather than improvise.
We don’t run a community, a Discord or a cohort. Those are useful things. We do this one instead.
Where you can help#
The useful thing is data. Published earnings benchmarks are mostly third-party estimates and we flag them as such throughout the site, but a labelled guess is still a guess. Figures from people actually doing the work are worth more than all of it. See get involved if you’re willing to share yours.