The State of Passive Income August 2021

 The state of passive income is not well!

As you may know, I wrote a book about passive income not too long ago. Unfortunately, the book is pretty out of date now. In just the past few years, it seems passive income has changed dramatically.

I think the first trend to mention is that phone farms are dead. I posted about this before. My Phone farm has been inactive for quite some time now, it made me a few hundred dollars in total using just some old otherwise worthless phones. All the apps I used on the phone have been discontinued for the most part.

The next trend is that being paid to watch videos is now dead as well. Perk.tv was a site some people used on their phone farm, but it was also a site you could use on the computer as well. You would play videos and get paid as you watched ads. I used quite a few sites like this and made some ok money. Most of the sites are gone now. Even sites that aren’t gone, like Inboxdollars or Swagbucks, don’t offer this feature any more. Previously I would have videos up all the time as I was using my computer for other things, I think it offset the electricity usage. Not sure how profitable they ever really were.

The next trend I wanted to mention is content creation. I think it is harder now for new creators to get started. Youtube a while ago changed its requirements for motization. Per Youtube, “To qualify for YPP you need to be in good standing with YouTube, have 4,000 valid public watch hours in the previous 12 months, and at least 1,000 subscribers.” Prior to this switch, monetization was lot easier to achieve. 

I also use display ads on my blog. The Ad Network I use on my blog hasn’t paid me anything in the past 2 months or so. My podcast has had very limited sponsorship opportunities. This also is probably more a me problem than anything to do with the state of passive income, but I haven’t had a book sale in quite a while. All of this section is just my experience though, so take it with a grain of salt, your results may vary. I will say, anecdotally, I have heard about quite a few podcast’s in a similar boat to mine regarding Anchor. Specifically, they haven’t found any new sponsors, many have been waiting a while. Hopefully, Anchor is able to find some new sponsors. I have also been debating trying Redcircle, a different podcast host, but I don’t want to migrate the show and not like it, so I have been working on a new show idea. The link will be here once it exists!

So what is working right now in passive income?

Well, like I mentioned before, Swagbucks and Inboxdollars are still working. They just don't have videos anymore. I may do a follow up post on Swagbucks and Inboxdollars showing exactly how I use to make money.

Another that makes me a lot with no work is bing. You just use sign up and use bing as your search engine and they will pay you. You can get Amazon gift cards or other rewards for using bing. I have made $150 so far from it.