The best way to make money

The excitement around newsletters and independent micro-media businesses is in many ways a do-over for the Web 2.0 era. The big difference: Web 2.0 was all about building large audiences through platforms that would be monetized with ads. Now, it’s about niche audiences and subscriptions.

But that misses a big lesson of the blogging boom. As bloggers built businesses, they focused squarely, almost maniacally on ads. That made sense since, well, that’s what everyone was doing. That turned out, in most cases, the wrong bet. I’d argue, however, the big lesson was different. It’s that the best way to make money is: lots of ways.