Passive income & making money online: Fedup with clickbait articles and dream sellers

I’ve been trying to generate passive income for a while now. I’m not looking for easy money (it doesn’t exist). In fact, my goal today is to generate €1,000 per year in passive income (through investment, content creation, and side projects).

I read a lot of articles and watch a lot of YouTube videos. But it’s very rare that I find something of quality, even though I do a lot of filtering and try not to read articles and videos that are too enticing or sell dreams.

I’m not saying that everything is false, but most of it is. And this phenomenon is getting out of control.

AI, text-to-speech, etc. are only making things worse. People don’t even bother to edit videos and create scripts themselves anymore. Today, everything is done through AI: script, text-to-speech, and voila.

Just do a research on Youtube on “how to generate passive income” and see the results by yourself.

The problem is that the more we click on this type of content, the more they make money, and the more we get scammed.

There are 3 types of videos of this kind:

• Self-help style videos that talk a lot without giving any relevant information or that tell us at the end to sign up for a training (generally paid) to access Eldorado and become a millionaire in 2 days.
• Videos that only talk about generalities, as if we don’t know that we need to create high-quality content to attract followers or buyers. Ok, but how do we get this quality?
• Simply deceptive videos, where we are sold dreams.

Once again, I’m not generalizing.

In fact, I saw a quote somewhere that is so true: if these people were millionaires as they claim, they wouldn’t be there creating videos with mediocre quality.

What to do?

Personally, I don’t fall into this trap easily, but lately I’ve decided to be more active and try to put barriers in place for these people.

• Start by filtering: if you very enticing offers, thumbnails where you only see large sums, just ignore it.
• Don’t hesitate to dislike this type of video (I don’t know if Medium offers this option for written posts) but on YouTube, yes.
• I report in some cases (when I see that fragile and vulnerable people can fall into the trap).

What are the solutions? How to make the cut?

I think this is the challenge of the next few years for content creation platforms like YouTube, Medium and others.