About
Why this exists
An enormous amount is written about how to make money, and almost none of it tells you how often it works. This site was built to publish that second number.
The problem is structural, not moral
It is tempting to explain the state of this field by saying the people in it are dishonest. That is mostly wrong, and it is the wrong diagnosis, because it implies the fix is better people. The actual cause is an incentive nearly everyone writing here shares: their income comes from teaching a method rather than from doing it.
Once that is true the rest follows automatically, without anyone deciding to deceive. You quote the average instead of the median, because the average is higher. You feature the person who succeeded, because their story converts. You never publish how many people tried and earned nothing, because you do not know and finding out would not help you. You order recommendations by commission and tell yourself the reader can judge for themselves.
None of those steps requires bad faith. Together they produce a body of writing that systematically overstates what independent work pays, which is how someone can do everything they were told and still end up below minimum wage.
What we do differently
We start from the population that filed taxes rather than the population that posted about it. Government records describe everyone who operated a business of a given type, including everyone who quietly earned nothing and never wrote a word online. That is the only place a real denominator exists, and it is public and free.
From it we compute one figure for every method: what an hour is worth doing it, after money spent and after time nobody pays you for. Every list on this site is sorted by that figure. Because it is computed rather than chosen, there is no field a payment or a preference could write to.
Read exactly how that is calculated
How we make money
This site carries advertising and some paid links, and it will sell tools to people who are already earning. It stays free to read, with no paywall over public data. Readers are owed a plain statement of that rather than a disclosure buried three clicks down.
Those relationships operate under one rule: a paid link may follow a conclusion but never lead one. The data selects the method; the tools you would need are listed afterwards, labelled, below the figures. What money cannot buy is inclusion, position, omission, or a change to any number — and that is enforced by how the ranking is computed rather than by a promise.
One revenue line is permanently closed to us. We will not sell courses, coaching or systems for making money. That is the specific conflict this site exists to correct, and taking it would end the argument for our existence.
Every commercial relationship we hold · Pricing
What we will never publish
- A mean where a median is the honest statistic.
- An earnings figure with no source anyone can check.
- A method record without a failure rate and a list of who should not attempt it.
- Numbers for a country whose data cannot support them. We will show what is available and say that we do not know.
- Near-identical pages generated to capture more search queries.
Corrections
If a number here is wrong, tell us and it will be fixed in the open, with the date and the change recorded on the record itself. Include the method, the figure you dispute, and the source you believe is correct. A site publishing failure rates for other people\u2019s work should be able to take a correction about its own.
Where this project actually is
No method records are live yet. The data pipeline that produces the failure rates is being built first, because a method page without a real denominator is precisely the kind of page this site was created to argue against. We could publish a plausible-looking ranked table today. That is the normal way to launch here, and it is the reason the field cannot be trusted.