LABOUR OF LOVE
FROM LEISURE TIME TO THE BIG TIME: HOW HOBBYISTS CAN TURN PASSIONS INTO PROFITABLE ENDEAVOURS Words: Shuman Ghosemajumder “Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises,” said Demosthenes in ancient Greece. The spirit of those words is echoed today throughout California’s Silicon Valley, where many great companies originated from the proverbial small acorns. While it takes a huge amount of talent, hard work and luck [...]
FROM LEISURE TIME TO THE
BIG TIME: HOW HOBBYISTS CAN TURN PASSIONS INTO PROFITABLE ENDEAVOURS
Ghosemajumder
alt="Web 2.0 and Entrepeneurship" class="picright">“Small
opportunities are often the beginning of great
enterprises,” said Demosthenes in ancient Greece.
The spirit of those words is echoed today throughout
California’s Silicon Valley, where many great
companies originated from the proverbial small acorns.
While it takes a huge amount of talent, hard work
and luck to build an Apple, Google or Microsoft, the
one trait these firms share is that they were once
very small, with one or two highly dedicated
founders. The obsessive drive of founders is a key
ingredient in building a start-up into something
much larger. In fact, without their obsession the
endeavour never gets off the ground. And it doesn’t
matter whether the enterprise in question is a
software company, a hardware company, a business
completely unrelated to high tech, or even not a
business at all. Think not only of a Henry Ford or
Thomas Edison, but of a William Shakespeare or
Isaac Newton. If you become an authority in your
field, you have the potential to create something
powerful that matters to many.
alt="Web 2.0 and Entrepeneurship" class="picright">One
of the great untapped sources of such
authorities in any field is actually hobbyists
Hobbyists may (or may not) have formal training
or experience, but choose to spend inordinate
amounts of their personal time engaged in
activities which make them consummate experts
in that domain. Take travel, for example. There are
thousands of personal travellers who have a
broader and deeper knowledge of various regions
of the world than many travel professionals.
But what can hobbyists do with their knowledge?
One of the most common answers is share it.
Through email, blogs and websites, hobbyists
produce a tremendous amount of content, most of
which is distributed to the public free of charge.
They do this because they enjoy creating content,
sharing it, and getting feedback. In fact, if you have
a personal blog, a social networking profile, or
review products online for a company such as
Amazon.com, you too are potentially creating
content and attracting an audience.
Until recently, the content creation-sharing
feedback cycle was the full story for hobbyists. Any
attempt to take the hobby to “the next level” from
a business point of view typically required the
individual to turn their hobby into a full-time job
and then hope they had enough luck to make it
successful. The problem was that there wasn’t a
good way to continue the activity as a hobby
while also making significant money from it with
low risk. Online advertising offered promise but it
generally didn’t produce very much revenue for
publishers. This changed with the introduction of
Google AdSense in 2003.
Many people are aware that most of Google’s
revenue comes from online advertising and have
seen the text adverts that appear alongside Google
search results. One of the main reasons those ads
have been so successful for advertisers is because
of the highly relevant targeting they offer. When
someone types in a search for “buy a dozen roses”,
you have a very good idea of what kind of ads
would be most appropriate.
The problem of targeting is more complex when
it comes to determining what ad to put on a blog
post or news article, since web pages can contain
many different phrases and keywords. Google’s
solution was to build complex algorithms to
analyse the content of pages and determine the
true context of those phrases and show ads based
on what the website was about. By showing the
most relevant ads, the idea was that even a
hobbyist website, if it attracted a following, could
generate significant revenue just from visitors
clicking on the ads on the site.
alt="Web 2.0 and Entrepeneurship" class="picright">So
how well did it work? Today AdSense is a
multibillion-dollar business, utilised by thousands
around the world. A good example of a hobby turned
into a business is Mongabay.com, a web-based
business aimed at raising interest in wildlife and
wildlands. Founder Rhett Butler earns $10,000 to
$20,000 on a monthly basis through AdSense, which
has made him financially stable enough to quit his
nine-to-five job and focus on his environmental
effort. He uses the AdSense revenue to travel around
the world to gain a connection to the efforts he is
passionate about, garner hands-on experiences and
look for conservation opportunities. The travelling
allows him to add valuable content to his website.
The phenomenon of this additional
revenue empowering
hobbyists is fast becoming
a common story.
The big idea here is that
many people have hobbies.
One of the most significant
internet trends in the
past few years has
been the proliferation
of Web 2.0 product
(such as YouTube), resulting in an increasing
number of us becoming content creators.
AdSense (as well as other content advertising
systems) have expanded to keep pace, offering
more options such as video ads and ads in RSS
feeds. Eventually, we will all be creating content.
Can you imagine what a significant opportunity
it will create to capitalise upon?
The result of this will be that when you find
you are better at creating a certain type of
content (say, restaurant reviews or photography
tips) than others, you will have the ability to be
compensated for the content you create, with
little or no risk. Not only is this great for the
hobbyists who create content, but users benefit
from access to more free content from well-
supported content creators. All you need to ask
yourself is: what is that small opportunity that
you might build into something great?
