News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Ask HN: What passive income investments exist to suppleme... by bugzz on Monday May 10, 2021 @01:14PM (#27108345)
Are the books any good? What are reviews like?
Re:Ask HN: What passive income investments exist to suppleme... by robmerki on Monday May 10, 2021 @01:19PM (#27108393)
They are poor quality and clearly written by ghost writers.

I don't blame people for going for the easy money, but it's like paying "writers" to write thousands of articles about "best pool equipment 2021" to target keywords on Google just so you can soak up Amazon affiliate revenue. Sure you make money, but how many people are reading your "blog" as fact?

Re:Ask HN: What passive income investments exist to suppleme... by marmot777 on Tuesday May 11, 2021 @03:41AM (#27115337)
Yeah, the review sites that drive affiliate revenue with content marketing SEO tend to hire low cost writers to do web searches and write articles, stopping just short of the plagiarism line, realizing that duplicate content isn’t good for SEO.

These sites aren’t going to to really test the pool cleaning equipment, the web hosting services being reviewed and ranked, learning Python tutorials. Nobody is going to pay anyone to test anything to make sure how the how-to cobbled together from three similar articles actually works.

Re:Ask HN: What passive income investments exist to suppleme... by impostervt on Monday May 10, 2021 @01:18PM (#27108379)
I like to think my books are good. One has over 900 reviews with an average of 4.8 stars. Two others have over 100 reviews with about a 4.6. The 4th one has about 20 reviews with 4.4 stars-ish (I didn't follow the formula on this one, my own fault).

I'm not the only one doing this, of course. Most of the books I see my competitors make are of lower quality, but they probably paid a lot less for them. In general, books made by people like me read like really long blog posts - because that's where most of the information comes from.

Re:Ask HN: What passive income investments exist to suppleme... by glenneroo on Friday May 14, 2021 @04:12PM (#27159177)
Did you buy any of those reviews?