You're not beating a dead horse but at the same time you're right, it is harder to make money from websites nowadays. Six years ago my 17 (at the time) year old son made enough money to buy himself a brand new car and loads of other things on the back of a game cheats site. Now? He's dropped it because it requires too much effort.

If you apply enough effort and thought to websites the money is still there.

Another question along the same lines might be - will it continue to get more difficult to earn money from websites?

Some people can make money online. Google makes a million dollars every 17 minutes, for example. |)

Once upon a time, there was the California Gold Rush (1848 to about 1855 {about 7 years}). It came and went as gold became harder and harder to find. Gold is still mined (or panned for) today by "big" mines as well as the "loners", but nothing like 150 years ago. There is still gold out there, but finding it and recovering it is not easy.

Internet 101

In 1995 when I started there simply weren't that many sites - in the thousands. So - Making money was relatively easy (little competition). 1995 through about 2000 to 2003 was the "window" (my opinion).

In 2011 there are estimated to be over 300,000,000 (depending upon whose numbers you believe) sites, about 100,000,000 are considered "active". These days there is competition - A *LOT* of competition.

Growth has been exponential. New entrants these days are fighting over the niches (in short they missed the gold rush).

This is also why people complain about Google (and other) search engines. They fail to understand that when Google started there weren't that many web sites as compared to today so they generally came up with "good" results. Considering the growth of the number of sites on the internet it has become much harder for a search engine algorithm to identify "the best" sites for a topic. Think of it this way - If there are only 5 applicants for a job it's easy to select the "best" one. When there are 50,000 applicants for the job finding the "best" applicant is *very* difficult.

These days everyone and their brother and cousin and mother is trying to make money off the internet. The decline in the world economy (job losses, pension plans destroyed, etc.) is also a factor in pushing more and more people to try to make money on the internet.

Yes - As time goes on it will continue to be harder for *most* people to make money online, especially new entrants, but also for some of the oldies out there. The internet has changed (and continues to change) significantly. There is money to be made by those who work hard and don't expect to make a lot of money over night. But if you keep at it and it is your *job* (i.e. it really is *work* keeping up), you can make plenty of money.

As an added thought, the internet is now very, very commercialized by big companies as opposed to what was originally a lot of "mom and pop" businesses. When Walmart comes to town they destroy many "mom and pop" stores. It's no different on the internet.

Once upon a time I could just drop Adsense onto a very low traffic hobby site (15 - 20 visitors per day) and it would still pay for the hosting. As Elsmarc says, those days are gone.

You need to own your own product these days to make serious money. If you're creative and can pick up on what people need, then create a product around that, you can still do very well online.

I don't think it's hard to make money online if you have something good, but the 'any old crap for money' days are probably over.

I'm switching my focus from content to tools, Built a lot of tools to help protect, manage and keep my content clean and I'm going to open those up to the public over the next year, got 2 in progress now.

You can either be a gold miner or sell tools to gold miners and with Panda, I'm now opting to sell tools instead of hunting for the constantly moving gold ;)

Who knows, it's Google's plot to dominate the world online and we're all pawns to their whims now, no longer are the content creators in charge and that's just wrong. You know its wrong when the search engine company makes more than all the websites it 'borrows' content from to make its rankings lists.

What I do know is that I will EMBRACE the day I see either Facebook or Twitter launch a global search engine.