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 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.

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.

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?