Are online side hustles just another lottery?

Yesterday, I asked my AI to evaluate the odds of me earning anywhere near $5,000 per month from my online projects, if I continued working at them for a full year.

The answer was: well below 1%.

And I’m hardly alone. There are more than 200 million content creators worldwide, with around 50 million considered professional or semi-professional. That’s a lot of people competing for attention.

The numbers sound scary until you look closer.

Most creators publish inconsistently. Many stop after a few months. Many never build a website, never start an email list, never connect their various platforms together, and never develop a substantial catalogue of work.

That said, even among creators who remain active and consistently publish, only a small percentage ever build substantial audiences (only 2% reach audiences of more than 100,000 followers).

Looking at those figures, pursuing an online side hustle can feel a bit like playing the lottery.

So is it?

The odds of winning a major lottery jackpot are extraordinarily small. Depending on the game, your chances might be somewhere between one in ten million and one in several hundred million. For a single ticket holder, that’s close enough to impossible.

In a way, the odds of succeeding with online content can feel much the same.

But the difference is: creative projects are not a single random draw.

Success in music, writing, blogging, YouTube, and other forms of content creation is usually the result of thousands of small events accumulating over time:

Publishing a track or a video, creating a pin, writing a blog post, someone sharing your work…

Each time, generating a profit has a modest probability attached to it, but unlike a lottery ticket, you get to keep playing, and your previous efforts don’t disappear.

A creative project accumulates assets, skills improve and experience compounds.

None of this guarantees success, but it does mean that the odds are not fixed. Every new piece of work slightly changes them.

In a lottery, your chances never improve. With content creation, if you keep showing up, they do.