The "normal career path" looks very different from ages 20-40 than 40-60: that's what creates a lot of "involuntary entrepreneurs." Not everyone starting work at Google today, for example, will enjoy the same kinds of returns, and even job security, that have been demonstrated over the last ten years.

by that criteria you can create a wordpress blog, slap some adsense on it, and make $10 a month with it.

And even that is harder than it seems.

Not really. Updating regularly with good content and some SEO and you could easily get $10/month with adsense.

> Updating regularly

> with good content

> and some SEO

> could

That's what I said.

Updating regularly for $10 / month is a pretty hefty commitment, that's going to work out to what ? $0.30 / hour ?

Good content requires writing skills and editing skills.

SEO requires SEO skills, you'll have to do that yourself because at $10 / month you are not going to pass it off to someone else to do it for you. That's a good bit of reading.

And finally, that's a 'could', not a 'will' or 'shall', it remains to be seen if it will work for that particular case of content, update frequency and SEO skills.

For less than $300 / month you're better off washing cars.

You're making it sound like you need to be a professional writer to earn $10/month. I can earn that amount with maybe 20 minutes of work every 2 or 3 days, which, by the way, anyone can unless they're computer illiterate.

Whether you're better off washing cars is another argument.

30 / 2 * 20 / 60 / 10 that comes out to $2 per hour.

So what's your point?

Well my point is that $2/hour is kind of low.

Whenever I see people giving these estimates about how their blog is earning $5 a day without doing anything, they always seem to be low-balling the amount of time they spent on it.

I've had multiple ad sense websites and they all net below $1/hour. I'm sure I can improve that, but not enough to be a worthwhile part-time job.

I would be happy to have someone prove me wrong by helping me build a low effort $10+/hour blog, but until then, I remain skeptical.

So writing something for 20 minutes every 3 days (which some might even enjoy) counts as a part-time job? It's like saying browsing on HN is a part-time job. Or were you talking about the $5 a day? In that case, yes, you might have to put a little more effort into it.

However, building a blog that earns $5 a day without doing anything(or let's just say, doing a lot less than you're supposed to) is possible, but it's just not ethical.

Let's not get hung up on definitions here. It doesn't really matter if $10/month is a job or just a hobby to you. The important question, is whether or not it is attainable with low effort as you seem to suggest.

I've built a few websites with pagerank 2-4 where I spent more than 20 minutes every 3 days and enjoyed it. All of them have netted less than $10/month over a span of 5 years.

This experience has led me believe it is not possible to even get to $10/month without treating it as a job...unless you happen to enjoy blogging about acai berry and prescription drugs.

Let me ask you a few simple question:

Do you have a blog ?

Url please ?

How much money does it make ?

How much time do you spend on keeping it up-to-date ?

How much time did you spend building ?

How much time did you spend gaining your SEO skills?

How long has it been running ?

With those figures we can work out exactly what your hourly rate was, can you provide this ?

So ~200 minutes per month for 10$

~3$/hr