I missed the golden age (sort of)

I missed the golden age of blogging (sort of): I was a fresh writer working on a university degree and a career goal of "freelancer". Sort of an insane goal to have at the time (where you gonna get clients, Mallow?), but no more insane than graduating into the biggest economic recession since 1929.

Back then, blogging was all the rage. I guess it was sort of like YouTube, where you could easily list either of them as a career if you hit the wave just right. It was an even mix of timing, skill, content, and sheer luck. You had to hit it right when Adspace was new and algorithms were reasonably easy to predict, and when people didn't have a major plethora of choices for content. You had a regular posting schedule, followed by reading and commenting on other blogs to help each other's ranking and audience engagement.

Hopefully, what you put out there struck someone as interesting enough to want to learn more.

This was also a period (incidentally) where teaching abroad was a viable and easy enough career to pursue. It's the original "digital nomad". People wanted to read about your adventures in a new job and culture.

A lot of people released free e-books (because gaining clout back then was ridiculous), in addition to all the content they provided through the blog. Driving traffic brought money, but I missed this wave, so I don't know what the numbers looked like. I think a lot of us were taught some fairly old school doctrine that a print book means you've "made it", so this whole platform doubled as a launch pad for a traditionally published book (for the very lucky ones).

Nowadays, I think it's more difficult to build a platform, but I see a number of skilled creators are able to get it done. The biggest difficulty is that it seems the model right now is very active, whereas the Web 2.0 crowd was almost obsessed over "passive income". Now, there's nothing passive about maintaining an active blog, but advertising money sort of allows you a small sense of "if you build it, they will come"? A Patreon (to me) is far more stable, but it's a very active arrangement. You give me $1 and I will provide my promised content.