Forget Monetization to Actually Make Money

Opening

Dear reader, there’s one word you can’t escape these days whenever you open social media: monetization. How to get rich with AI. How to make ₩10,000,000 (~$7,200) a month from content. How to achieve financial freedom through a knowledge business. Half the content your algorithm recommends seems to revolve around this single word.

But here’s the odd part. This kind of content is everywhere, yet people who’ve actually made money after watching it are nowhere to be found. Why is that? I think the answer lies in how the word “monetization” itself gets used.

Why “Monetization” Can’t Come First

The word “monetization” itself is innocent. The problem is that it gets treated as a starting point — the question “How do I monetize this?” comes first. But flip the structure and it’s simple: you need something worth building before revenue can follow. The order has been completely reversed.

Elon Musk’s case illustrates this well. After Tesla unveiled its humanoid robot Optimus, a reporter asked Musk which stocks he’d buy for the coming robot era. You’d expect an answer like Tesla or Nvidia, but Musk said something different: “If I were you, I’d start a company.” The best move, he said, is to build a company that the robot era actually needs — and that’s exactly how he’s always made his own money.

That comment cuts right to the heart of the monetization discourse. Building something comes first; revenue follows as a result. If all you ever ask is “How do I monetize this?”, you will never arrive at a structure that actually makes money.

Five Kinds of Side Hustles, and the Cold Reality

I get it — anyone with a day job wants extra income. Out of 24 hours, once you subtract work, commuting, sleep, and basic life admin, you’re left with maybe 4 to 6 hours. Within that window, the side hustles people can realistically pursue fall into roughly five categories.

First, converting traffic into money. This takes the form of influencer businesses, ad revenue, or affiliate marketing — structures that turn attention into income.

Second, the margin game. Dropshipping or running a Naver Smart Store (Korea’s leading e-commerce platform) — buying cheap and selling high. But as platforms like AliExpress and Temu enter the Korean market directly, that margin is shrinking fast.

Third, rebranding. Using your own fame or personal brand to add value to an existing product — think influencers slapping their name on cosmetics or health supplements.

Fourth, knowledge businesses. Creating and selling e-books or online courses — probably the most visible form these days.

Fifth, repackaging a strategy that already worked once and selling it as a one-off. The seller made money with it before, but by the time you copy it, the window has already closed — it’s just dressed up to look plausible. Naturally, it doesn’t work for the buyer.

None of these five approaches is inherently bad. The problem is how casually people dive in. According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data, about 49% of new businesses shut down within five years¹​. Narrow the focus to startups and the numbers get even harsher — even among venture-backed startups, roughly 75% fail to return investors’ capital. Per Bankrate’s 2025 survey, the median monthly income for side hustlers was just $200 (~₩280,000). The average comes out to $885 (~₩1,240,000), but that’s only because a handful of high earners drag the mean up.

Snake Oil and the Micro-Learning Trap

The real problem in the monetization-course market is how the product gets sold. Twelve minutes of content gets sliced into segments of three, four, four, and one minute, then repackaged as a “100-lecture course.” It gets dressed up with the fancy label micro-learning²​, but at its core, it’s just chopping content into pieces to inflate the lecture count.

Think about it soberly. Why do Harvard and MIT professors still teach three-hour lectures? There’s a reason Nvidia’s deep learning training and Andrew Ng’s Coursera courses are offered as year-long, full-length programs: deep knowledge simply can’t be chopped up and still transmitted.

This approach turns genuinely harmful the moment it starts putting others down. The instant someone claims “university professors teach stale, useless knowledge” in order to argue their own course is superior, that’s no longer marketing — it’s deception. Structurally, it’s identical to old-time peddlers hawking snake oil as a cure-all and skipping town before anyone caught on. The only difference now is that there’s an internet, and nowhere left to run.

Build Value First, and Revenue Will Follow

So how should you actually approach this? The key is building repeatable value — designing a structure where revenue keeps recurring, rather than one where you sell once and it’s over.

Let me give a concrete example. Say a foreign SaaS company wants to enter the Korean market. If it wants to hand out $20 discount coupons, simply issuing those coupons is a pure cost to the company — it’s essentially the same as issuing a negotiable security³​. But structure it financially, and the story changes. If a Korean partner buys those coupons at $10, distributes them to customers for free, then bills the parent company for the cost, the parent’s expense drops by half. And if conversions happen, the cost drops even further.

This kind of financial thinking is what actually builds a business. Even issuing a single coupon requires a GTM⁴​ strategy and financial design. It’s an entirely different order of magnitude from slicing up a lecture and selling the pieces.

Oz’s Lens

Honestly, I react to the word “monetization” myself. It’s one of those words that pushes my buttons.

I spent about 10 years as an employee and several years running my own business, so I’ve lived both sides. As a GTM strategy consultant, I helped foreign companies enter the Korean market, and starting as a one-person company, I ended up signing a contract with a global corporation worth ₩456 trillion (~$328 billion). At first, the reaction was “how could a one-person company possibly work with us?” But once I proved the value and showed the results were repeatable, the door opened.

Here’s an irony I’ve noticed: in Korea, people spend freely on monetization courses but balk at paying for consulting. Abroad, it’s the opposite. People take it for granted that you pay an expert for consulting in a field you don’t understand, while they don’t easily open their wallets for a course that promises to “make you money.”

I don’t think this is just a cultural difference — it’s a difference in how people perceive value. Spending money on the fantasy that “someone else will make me rich” is, in practice, the surest pipeline for making the instructor rich instead.

Closing

Let me sum up today’s argument in three points.

First, monetization is a result, not a goal.You have to build something first; revenue follows. Reverse the order, and nothing gets built at all.

Second, whether it’s a side hustle or a startup, the key is building repeatable value. A structure where you sell once and disappear isn’t a business — it’s snake oil.

Third, before spending money on a course that promises to “make you rich,” a far wiser investment is paying an expert to consult you in a field you don’t understand. (Oddly, in Korea there seems to be a reluctance to pay for consulting at all — more of a “let me buy you a meal and pick your brain for free” vibe.)

In 2026, I want to show you, through real projects, exactly how a business gets designed and grown. Not just in words — I’ll share the actual approach itself. If you’re curious, feel free to email me anytime. I always reply.

📎 References & Further Reading

• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Business Employment Dynamics”, 2024. : The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ official data on new-business survival rates by year. This is the source for the 49% five-year closure rate cited above.
• Bankrate, “Side Hustle Survey”, 2025. : An annual survey of American side hustlers’ monthly income, motivations, and generational differences. The basis for the $200 median side-hustle income figure.
• CB Insights, “The Top Reasons Startups Fail”, 2021. : A report analyzing over 100 startup failures, concluding that 42% failed due to a lack of market demand.
• Intuit, “The Side Hustle Generation: Gen Z and Millennials Redefine Financial Success”, 2024. : A survey-based report analyzing side-hustle trends and motivations among Gen Z and Millennials.

The author, Kwangseob Ahn, is a professor of business administration at Sejong University and lead consultant at OBF (Oswarld Boutique Consulting Firm). He teaches statistics and data analysis — business data management and business analytics — while leading GTM and AI strategy consulting in the field, designing the seam between technology and business. He has published academic research on a memory architecture for AI dialogue systems (HEMA) and runs Daily Arxiv, a daily curation of global AI papers. He holds a master’s from Korea University’s Graduate School of Technology Management and a KMBA. He is the author of Homo Brainless: The People Who Outsource Their Thinking.

Footnotes

1. BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics): A U.S. Department of Labor statistical agency that publishes official data on employment, wages, prices, and more. One of the most reliable sources for business survival statistics. ↩

2. Micro-learning: Delivering learning content in short units (typically 3–5 minutes). Originally a supplementary teaching method for busy learners, it’s sometimes distorted into a marketing tactic to inflate the number of lectures. ↩

3. Negotiable security (yugajeungkwon): A document representing a right of financial value. Like a coupon or gift certificate, the issuing company incurs an obligation to eventually honor that value — which is why issuing coupons shows up as an accounting cost. ↩

4. GTM (Go-To-Market): The strategy for bringing a new product or service to market. It encompasses target customer selection, pricing, distribution channel design, and marketing planning. ↩