(Legitimate & respectable) strategies to generate “passive income” on the Internet?
"If you want real no hassle, look into getting an agent: http://www.xmarks.com/topic/photographers_agents Check Problogger for blogging info: http://www.problogger.net/ Passive income takes work.  Making money off writing a novel/blogging, or photography is great, but you have to write the novel or take the pictures worth buying first. I've spent the last 3 years building a student management system for martial art studios, but it's been discouraging at times and lots of extra time and effort. If you have a common ideas for making passive money, then you have to be uncommon in the implementation.  Which takes work. To quote one of the comments: You will never find a ""thing"" that   will generate substantial amounts of   money without needing day-to-day   taking care of. He's right, the key is substantial, start slow, but start.  If you don't start you'll never finish.  And if you do it because you love it, the money won't matter. Sorry, this isn't a good answer, but it's a question that you'll need to answer yourself.  My best suggestion, find a gap and fill it." "The notion that you can put product on the web and sit back and watch the money roll in is a myth, plain and simple.  If you put content on the web and expect people to pay money for your products (t-shirts, etc), you have to do the work to get your stuff seen by people, and preferably the right kind of people who will buy your stuff. That means you need to know your market and provide something that they are eager to pay for. This doesn't necessarily mean buying advertising to direct traffic to your site - there are plenty of no-cost ways to bring people to your web site, but instead of costing $$ the cost is in effort and time that you have to put into it. Also keep in mind that the more participants you have in your production and fulfillment pipeline, the less you will make off every sale. Hands-off production services like Zazzle or Cafe Press do everything for you, all you have to do is provide the artwork.  However, they also take all the income and pay you a rather piddling percentage of sales.  You can get a larger percentage of sales if you do more of the work yourself - like handmade items sold on Etsy.  But then, you're doing work. Maybe you'll get $1 for each T-Shirt you sell.  If you just upload your artwork to the production service and type in some product description text into their web sales catalog, how many sales will you make in the first month?  Most likely somewhere between zero and two.  Why should anyone buy your shirt over the tens of thousands of other designs carried by the same production service?  It's your responsibility to tell people about your stuff and send them to the site to buy it.  And that means it's not a ""passive"" income. For truly passive income, invest in bank CD's, treasury bonds, or in stocks that pay dividends.  The only problem with that is you have to have money to make money this way. :/" One such place where you can sell your photos is iStockPhoto.  They are pretty picky about the photos they allow, so you should be a pretty good photographer and have good equipment.  It can take a while to build up an interest in your photos, but once you do you can make some decent money off it.  My sister is a semi-pro photographer and makes about $500 a month off photos she sells there. One idea that I read among some of the many, many personal finance blogs out there is to create a niche website with good content and generate some ad revenue. The example the author gave was a website he'd made with some lessons to learn basic Spanish. Something as specific as that has a reasonable chance of becoming popular even if you never post new content (since you were looking for passive). The ad income won't be great, but it's likely to stay > 0 for a significant while.
"Now I say this with all due respect, and I mean with all due respect. You sound like a bitch. I've never witnessed someone take criticism so personally. For someone who claims to ""[not] really care what strangers on the internet think about [them]"", you seem to be doing an awful lot of caring." "No, your business cannot deduct your non-business expenses.  You can only deduct from your business income those reasonable expenses you paid in order to earn income for the business. Moreover, for there to be a tax benefit, your business generally has to have income (but I expect there are exceptions; HST input tax credits come to mind.) The employment income from your full-time job wouldn't count as business income for your corporation. The corporation has nothing to do with that income – it's earned personally, by you. With respect to restaurant bills: These fall under a category known as ""meals & entertainment"".  Even if the expense can be considered reasonable and business-related (e.g. meeting customers or vendors) the Canada Revenue Agency decided that a business can only deduct half of those kinds of expenses for tax purposes. With respect to gasoline bills: You would need to keep a mileage and expense log. Only the portion of your automobile expenses that relate to the business can be deducted.  Driving to and from your full-time job doesn't count. Of course, I'm not a tax professional.  If you're going to have a corporation or side-business, you ought to consult with a tax professional. (A point on terminology: A business doesn't write off eligible business expenses — it deducts them from business income.  Write off is an accounting term meaning to reduce the value of an asset to zero. e.g. If you damaged your car beyond repair, one could say ""the car is a write-off."")" &gt;Many studies have shown that index funds and passive investing are the most successful strategies for users. This is the opposite of what Robinhood encourages.  I've been with Robinhood awhile now... and I have only used it to purchase shares of index ETFs.  I have never felt encouraged by them to day trade or actively manage investments. "One of the best answers to this question that I've ever read is in a paper published by Robert Lucas in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. That journal is meant to a be a place for experts to write about their area of expertise (in economics) for a general but still technically-minded audience. They recently opened up the journal as free to the public, which is a fantastic resource -- you no longer need a subscription to JSTOR (or whatever) to read it.  You can read the abstract to the paper, and find a link to it, here. One of the things that I like a lot about this paper is that it strips out absolutely everything even slightly unnecessary to thinking about a macroeconomy, and just discusses what one can arrive at with a very very simple model. Of course, with great simplicity come sacrifice about details. However, it does a great job of answering your question, ""why do people care about growth?"" A quick note: the key to understanding the answer to your question is to think about things in terms of ""the long term""  -- not even looking forward to the future, because we'll be dead by then, but looking back to the past. The key to the importance of growth is that, for the last ~200 years, the US has, on average, had maybe 2-3% ""real growth"" per year (I'm pulling these numbers out of my head; I think much better numbers are in that paper somewhere). On average, over that period of time, this growth has meant that the quality of life that one has, if one lives in a country experiencing this growth, is enormous compared to countries that do not experience this average growth over that period.  Statistically speaking, growth is also somewhat auto-correlated. Roughly speaking, if it was low the last few periods, you can expect it to be low the next period. Same thing if it's high.   Then, the reason we care about growth right now: if you have too many periods of low growth, pretty soon the average ""over the long term"" growth will be pulled down -- and then quality of life can't be higher in the future (which quickly becomes someone's ""present""). The paper above makes this point with a very simple model. Of course, none of this touches on distributional issues, which are another issue entirely. With respect to, ""The economy needs to grow to just keep up with its debt repayments,"" I think the answer is along the lines of, ""sometimes countries get into debt expecting that growth will increase their resources in the future, and thus they can pay back their debt."" That strategy is, of course, the strategy that anyone borrowing (""taking out a loan"") should be employing -- you should expect that your future income will be enough to pay back your interest+principle on a loan you took. Otherwise you're irresponsible. At the aggregate level, production is the nation's ""income"" -- it is what you have, all that you have (as a nation) to pay back any debt you've incurred at the national level." No ulterior motives?  You do seem to submit a lot of links to sites like io9, forbes, torrentfreak, theverge, etc. and submit the same article to multiple reddits.  Your links to, for example, theverge also began at the same time that I began seeing them submitted by other users, so I have always been suspicious of your posts. I think you would definitely need to distinguish between sites with different business models, some would want to bill by content downloaded, others by number of page visits,...). Time spent there doesn't seem like a good measurement with the current, request-based model of how the web works. Meh. I'm an advertiser, and it pays off brilliantly. One of the businesses relies 100% on Google ads (a hire company) and does well. Others use various forms of advertising (although skewed towards internet, we do print etc as well) to disseminate news and it's the best way we've found.  Whatever Tor opinion on online advertising, it works. Otherwise we wouldn't spend so much £ on it. I guess my point of view is that if domain seizing becomes a very prominent thing than proxies become a prominent thing amongst piraters - not that they already aren't, but I'm of the belief that whatever technology legislators embrace for combating piracy, pirates embrace an equally effective converse technology.   As usual there will be a lot of unsuspecting American citizens hurt by SOPA but eventually the people who have made torrents successful for the average Internet user will be able to make proxies, hidden downloads, and mirrors extremely user-friendly and easy-to-use for the public. As far as I'm concerned combatting piracy through legislation rather than business practices is opening pandora's box.   Right now it's possible to make your ISP see nothing but bandwidth, it's difficult to set-up, and a pain to maintain, but if content providers want to wage war, they should be prepared to lose, and lose hard.