Originally Posted by AmeliaG

Print publishing is having a bit of a resurgence, but I'm just going to say that I did writing and/or photography for pretty much all the big magazine publishers in the 90's -- Playboy, Penthouse, Flynt, AVN, Magna, Crescent etc. plus publishing Blue Blood -- and my jaw fucking dropped when I got my first membership site check.

Admittedly, I started off online with the advantage of already having an offline following, but I feel very qualified to say that content online, at least for many years, paid exponentially more than successful offline did before it.

That said, it is trickier to figure out the best ways for a webmaster to monetize today. For example, I'd love to just produce quality exclusive content and post it for free and monetize with ads and affiliate up sells, but the reality is that content wouldn't be exclusive for a minute. Even my non-adult publications have to compete with Facebook and such for eyeballs and knowing basic programmatic advertising doesn't change that.

Nobody expects the secret sauce recipe for free, but it would be nice to see more implementable suggestions than just, "FFS, don't follow Paul's example."