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In the past 20-30 years, passive income from online business endeavors was primarily coming from content-based businesses where you could produce content, package it (as an ebook, course, etc.), and sell it, or sell advertising along your content.
(Sure, there are exceptions in SaaS and other business models but these usually require employees to maintain them, and that makes them unlikely to be truly passive in the same way as pure digital products.)
But while information by itself has been free for a long time yet people still bought online education, AI has now completely changed the game. Now it's not only information that's free. It's personalized information that's free.
So all the static courses with videos (or even worse, pure text) have lost their value. Sure, these courses may still sell because people pay for curation or because they trust the creator.
But it's inevitable that fewer and fewer people will pay for online education in its traditional "build it once and forget it" model. They can have AI create a super personalized course and get better results for free while having access to a "tutor" 24/7.
It seems to me that these days most courses need to involve some active aspect - a workshop, regular calls, a community or accountability. Otherwise, they've become a really hard sell unless it's something very niche where AI doesn't have much information.
So if you need to add some kind of personal involvement, these previously largely passive products have turned into services.
And that makes me think: what's the point of selling a supposedly "passive" course for, say, $200 and still needing to be personally involved if you could sell a service (or even better, an async service) and sell it for, say, $4,000?
In both cases, you still need to be involved, but it's way easier to sell a service with a defined result than a course with just a promise but no guaranteed results (because the student may not do the work). And if it's an async service, then it actually is now more passive than courses requiring personal involvement.
With AI, the only remaining advantage humans have is the actual human touch. So does this mean that passive income is going to slowly become the thing of the past?
(Sure, there are exceptions in SaaS and other business models but these usually require employees to maintain them, and that makes them unlikely to be truly passive in the same way as pure digital products.)
But while information by itself has been free for a long time yet people still bought online education, AI has now completely changed the game. Now it's not only information that's free. It's personalized information that's free.
So all the static courses with videos (or even worse, pure text) have lost their value. Sure, these courses may still sell because people pay for curation or because they trust the creator.
But it's inevitable that fewer and fewer people will pay for online education in its traditional "build it once and forget it" model. They can have AI create a super personalized course and get better results for free while having access to a "tutor" 24/7.
It seems to me that these days most courses need to involve some active aspect - a workshop, regular calls, a community or accountability. Otherwise, they've become a really hard sell unless it's something very niche where AI doesn't have much information.
So if you need to add some kind of personal involvement, these previously largely passive products have turned into services.
And that makes me think: what's the point of selling a supposedly "passive" course for, say, $200 and still needing to be personally involved if you could sell a service (or even better, an async service) and sell it for, say, $4,000?
In both cases, you still need to be involved, but it's way easier to sell a service with a defined result than a course with just a promise but no guaranteed results (because the student may not do the work). And if it's an async service, then it actually is now more passive than courses requiring personal involvement.
With AI, the only remaining advantage humans have is the actual human touch. So does this mean that passive income is going to slowly become the thing of the past?
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