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Blogging is still a viable business in 2024, but only as one piece of a multi-channel content brand. That is the qualified yes from Bobby Hoyt, founder of Millennial Money Man, whose blog is on pace for roughly $2 million in revenue this year while he is actively diversifying into YouTube, in-house courses, and even acquiring a bookkeeping firm. Starting a blog as your only asset is what he no longer recommends.
I brought Bobby onto the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast to answer the exact question I keep getting from readers: is a blog still worth starting, and if so, how do you build one that survives Google, AI, and the collapse of easy affiliate revenue?
Here is Bobby’s playbook, the numbers behind his $2M business, and the diversification moves he is making right now.
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Table of Contents
Key takeaways
- Millennial Money Man is on pace for ~$2 million in revenue in 2023, with almost all of it coming from the blog. Bobby still calls Google the least trustworthy leg of his stool.
- Bobby recommends new creators start on YouTube rather than a blog in 2024. Video builds trust faster, converts courses better, and is less exposed to Google’s AI-era volatility.
- The business runs three main revenue streams: affiliate deals (largest today), in-house courses ($497-$597 price point), and paid ads through Facebook and Google to fill webinar funnels.
- Millennial Money Man’s live-webinar-to-course funnel is being replaced with break-even evergreen webinar funnels, because the real profit is coaching communities and high-ticket back-end programs.
- Bobby’s first course (Laptop Empires, teaching local Facebook ads) did $136,000 in its opening weekend to a 13,000-person email list. It hit seven figures in 14 months.
- Bobby is acquiring a bookkeeping firm as a Google-independent revenue leg, both to diversify off algorithms and to keep his bookkeeping course anchored in real practice.
Is blogging still a viable business in 2024?
Blogging is still a viable business in 2024, but only as part of a broader content brand that also includes video, an owned email list, and in-house products or services. Bobby Hoyt’s own site, Millennial Money Man, is on pace to do roughly $2 million in revenue this year, almost entirely from the blog. He is also the first to say he would not tell someone starting today to build a blog as their only asset.
The math still works, but the risk profile has changed. In 2015, a blog by itself could be a business.
In 2024, a blog by itself is a single point of failure sitting downstream of one company (Google) that keeps changing its mind.
Bobby’s compromise is to keep the blog running as the main revenue engine while aggressively diversifying into YouTube, in-house courses, and acquired service businesses. Anyone starting from zero today should build the video channel first and let the blog be the secondary asset.
Why start a YouTube channel before a blog in 2024?
New creators should start a YouTube channel before a blog in 2024 because video builds trust faster, converts high-ticket offers dramatically better, and is less exposed to Google’s AI-driven ranking volatility. Bobby has hired a dedicated head of YouTube content and is shifting Millennial Money Man’s growth budget toward video for exactly these reasons.
The trust argument is the biggest one. A blog post from a stranger and a YouTube video from a person whose face and voice you know are not the same product. When Bobby’s team A/B tested course sales from cold blog traffic versus warm YouTube viewers, the video audience converted at multiples of what the blog audience did.
YouTube is not immune to algorithm risk (Google owns it, after all). Bobby’s take is that it is meaningfully less bad than the current SEO landscape, and the format itself has more staying power. Video also feeds into short-form (Reels, Shorts, TikTok) as a byproduct, which a blog post does not.
How Millennial Money Man makes money (the revenue mix)
Millennial Money Man makes money through three main channels: affiliate revenue (currently the largest slice), in-house courses in the $497-$597 range, and paid ads that fill evergreen webinar funnels for those courses. Sponsored content is intentionally not a meaningful line item.
Affiliate revenue comes from sending leads to rideshare (Uber, Lyft, DoorDash), survey, and financial products where the audience has real transactional intent. It is the biggest revenue line and the one Bobby trusts the least, because a single affiliate program cancellation can wipe out a year’s worth of ranking work overnight.
The in-house course lineup includes Proofreading Launchpad, Brilliant Bookkeeper, Big Money Writer, and two or three more launching in 2024. A high-ticket accounting program aimed at professionals scaling to six figures is also in the pipeline. The courses exist specifically because Bobby wants revenue lines he actually controls.
The Bobby Hoyt course-instructor model (how he runs 6+ courses)
Bobby runs a growing catalog of courses without personally teaching most of them by structuring each course as a royalty deal with a subject-matter expert. Two patterns cover most cases: an internal employee with expertise creates and hosts a course, or an external practitioner is recruited, vetted, and signed to a royalty agreement.
The proofreading course (Proofreading Launchpad) is taught by full-time employee Ariel Gardner, who gets a royalty on top of her salary plus profit sharing and an equity pathway. That structure lets employees participate in the upside of a course they helped create without leaving the company.
The bookkeeping course (Brilliant Bookkeeper) is taught by Kristin Metter, an outside bookkeeping-firm owner who interviewed well, tested well on camera, and signed a royalty agreement. Bobby is now trying to bring her on full time. The general principle: you do not need to be the instructor of every course you sell, you need to be the operator that puts great instructors on the platform.
Why Bobby is switching from live to evergreen webinars
Bobby is switching Millennial Money Man from live webinars to evergreen (pre-recorded) webinar funnels because live webinars do not scale operationally, and the real profit is not on the front-end $497-$597 course anyway. It is in the coaching communities and high-ticket back-end offers those courses feed.
The trade-off is a lower conversion rate on the front end for a much higher operational ceiling. If a break-even funnel produces free customers who then buy the higher-ticket back-end, the front-end conversion rate is almost irrelevant. Bobby’s team is explicitly modeling front-end break-even, not front-end profit.
His pattern for the redesigned funnel is radical transparency. The new evergreen webinars open by telling viewers upfront that they will be pitched, then over-deliver on the free content, and follow up hard afterward. Consumer sophistication has killed the sneaky-webinar era; the honest one still converts.
How Bobby launched his first course to $136K in a weekend
Bobby launched his first course, Laptop Empires (teaching local Facebook ads to agency owners), to $136,000 in revenue in its opening weekend from a 13,000-person email list, and hit seven figures in 14 months. The launch worked because he had spent years giving away value with zero selling, so the list trusted him completely by the time he made an ask.
The list was small. Thirteen thousand subscribers is not a big list by 2024 standards. The conversion rate at launch was extraordinary because those thirteen thousand people had received months of free tactical content without a single pitch, and the goodwill translated into buyer intent when he finally offered a paid product.
The lesson generalizes. You do not need a huge audience to hit a strong launch. You need an audience that trusts you, and trust comes from giving before asking, at whatever ratio your patience allows.
How Bobby thinks about AI’s impact on blogging
Bobby’s read on AI is that it will reshape what human writers are paid to do, without killing writers or blogs outright. The valuable work shifts from “producing content” to “curating and quality-controlling AI output,” which Fincon speaker Paula Pant called being the “tastemaker.”
He is skeptical of the “generate 10,000 AI articles and dump them on your site” playbook that has become common in some SEO circles. Google keeps flip-flopping on whether AI content is fine, and the sites that bet the farm on it have taken outsized hits during core updates. Bobby’s team uses AI sparingly and keeps the Millennial Money Man voice explicitly conversational, which is why they survived the fall 2023 updates in decent shape.
His broader bet is that AI adoption will happen more slowly than headlines suggest. When he asked his nieces and nephews, ChatGPT was not something they used; everyone still Googled. The Yahoo-to-Google flip was one year, so mass shifts can happen fast, but he is not betting the business on ChatGPT displacing Google in 2024.
Why Bobby is acquiring a bookkeeping firm
Bobby is acquiring a bookkeeping firm as a Google-independent revenue leg and as a live testing ground for his Brilliant Bookkeeper course. The firm itself does not need to be huge. It just needs to generate cash that is completely detached from algorithms and provide a real-world workflow to keep the course content current.
Bookkeeping is unusually well-suited to this play. LTV on bookkeeping clients is extremely high (people rarely switch once they find a good bookkeeper), AI has already entered the space via QuickBooks and similar tools without displacing humans, and the tax-code nuance means human review will stay valuable for a long time. It is a compounding, low-churn asset.
The strategic logic applies well beyond bookkeeping. Any content brand that sells a course in a service category should look at whether it can own or acquire a small service business in that same category. The service business smooths revenue, informs the curriculum, and reduces algorithmic exposure all at once.
How long does it take a new blog to make real money?
A new blog takes at least 12-18 months to produce full-time-income revenue, and typically 2-3 years to hit six figures, according to both Bobby’s experience and mine. Anyone promising faster is selling something. The honest timeline is why Bobby recommends new creators either have another income source lined up or start with a service business alongside the blog.
Bobby’s own path: he quit his high school band-director job with $3 in blog revenue, and it took him about 18 months to earn what could reasonably be called a full-time income. He bridged the gap by running a local SEO agency, which paid the bills while the blog compounded.
My own timeline was similar. Two years to any meaningful income, three years to six figures.
The right frame is that the first six months should be treated as an investment where you make zero dollars, and any revenue in that window is a bonus. Expect no monetization for months and you will actually stick with the work long enough to reach it.
Frequently asked questions
Is starting a blog still worth it in 2024?
Starting a blog is still worth it in 2024 as one leg of a broader content strategy, but not as your only asset. Bobby Hoyt recommends new creators start with a YouTube channel first because video builds trust faster and is less exposed to Google’s AI-era volatility, then layer in a blog as a secondary traffic source.
How does Millennial Money Man make money?
Millennial Money Man makes money through three main channels: affiliate revenue from rideshare, survey, and financial product referrals; in-house courses in the $497-$597 range including Proofreading Launchpad, Brilliant Bookkeeper, and Big Money Writer; and paid ads on Facebook and Google that fill evergreen webinar funnels for those courses.
How much revenue does Bobby Hoyt’s blog generate?
Bobby Hoyt’s blog Millennial Money Man is on pace for approximately $2 million in revenue in 2023, with the majority coming from affiliate revenue and in-house course sales. The site has been growing since 2015 and is being expanded into a full media company with six full-time employees.
Should a new content creator start with a blog or YouTube?
A new content creator should start with YouTube in 2024, because video builds trust faster, converts higher-ticket offers better, and is less exposed to Google’s algorithm volatility than blog SEO. A blog can be added later as a secondary traffic source once the YouTube channel has traction.
How long does it take a blog to make full-time income?
A new blog typically takes 12-18 months to produce full-time-income revenue and 2-3 years to reach six figures. Bobby Hoyt bridged the gap with a local SEO agency; other bloggers use freelance work or a service business until the blog compounds enough to replace day-job income.
Is AI-generated content bad for SEO?
AI-generated content will not automatically wreck your SEO. The strategy of mass-producing thousands of AI articles and dumping them on a site has produced outsized hits during Google core updates. Bobby’s team uses AI sparingly and keeps a distinctly conversational human voice, which held up well through the fall 2023 updates.
What is the best price point for an online course?
The best price point for an online course depends on the audience’s earning potential and the outcome the course delivers. Bobby Hoyt sells his front-end courses at $497-$597 for consumer-audience programs and plans higher-ticket programs (multi-thousand-dollar range) for professional audiences like accountants and existing agency owners.
Are live or evergreen webinars better for selling courses?
Live webinars generally convert at a higher rate than evergreen webinars, but evergreen webinars scale operationally and free the team from constant live delivery. Bobby’s approach is to break even on the evergreen funnel and make the real profit on back-end coaching, community, and high-ticket programs the front-end course leads to.
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