The days when you could monetize the internet and get a living are gone, if they were ever here. The Luminous Landscape has gone to a subscription system: many newspapers only allow so many views per month.

I do not have advertisements. I switched off Disqus a while ago, because I found what it did intrusive. And I find the experience of click bait annoying — on a good day.

It’s telling that when the authors of the PageFair-Adobe report asked 400 Americans why they started using an ad blocker, the primary reason they gave was to avoid “misuse of personal information.” Twelve months ago, the research firm Ipsos surveyed people on behalf of the marketing services company TRUSTe and found that concern about online privacy was rising. The top cause for worry: “Companies collecting and sharing my personal information with other companies.” People feared that more than government surveillance. So it’s no wonder that ad blocking hockey-sticked in popularity after it became clear that other mechanisms for protecting personal privacy—such as “Do Not Track” (a function you can activate in your Web browser to request that sites not compile information on you)—were mostly ignored by the online advertising business. When Do Not Track proved toothless, millions of people got their own fangs.

That means we’ve gained bargaining power with advertisers and publishers. What should we bargain for?

The first and easiest answer is: advertising that’s not based on tracking our every step. In other words, the old-­fashioned Madison Avenue kind that is still what we get in the offline world.

Even if we don’t like ads fattening our magazines and interrupting our TV shows, we at least know the economic role they play and appreciate the best ones, which can be every bit as good as the content they sponsor. These ads send strong signals about brands, and yet they respect our privacy, don’t plant tracking beacons on us, and don’t lure us away from what we’re doing. The attractive ads that populate Vogue and other high-quality offline media are advertising’s wheat. The kind that drive millions of us to use ad blockers are advertising’s chaff.

Well, I do enjoy some of the superbowl adverts. However, I pay for spotify so I don’t have to listen to ads, and for movies without ads. I find them intrusive. Besides I buy the spectator — which is a slender magazine of text — not Vogue. I want to keep my man card.

So why are there so many blogs? For the same reason that there are plenty of choirs and amateur orchestras. It is a hobby: it is fun.

Shorter version: write because you enjoy the process and because you actually have something different to say. Don’t do it for the attention. Don’t do it for the money. Don’t do it because you like what you perceive as the lifestyle. Don’t do it because you like the image. Especially don’t do it because you think it is some sort of get-rich-quick scheme. It’s not. It’s the exact opposite due to the supply-and-demand curve; there are more people who want to write and are able to publish than ever before, combined with fewer people who read and buy books than there have been in decades. Writing is a hobby, not a profession, a career, or a business.

If you don’t have anything to say that isn’t already being said, don’t bother. If you’re just looking to express yourself, that’s what Pinterest and Twitter are for. If you’re just looking for attention, Tumblr and Facebook will suffice.

But… you cannot make a living out of these things. For long. Unless you are an outlier — Cameron Slater, Milo Yiannipolous, and Stacey McCain can do it. But it takes a huge effort.

And Slater has just monetized a subscription report.

The rest of us need to learn from photographers (and classical musicians). Most people with cameras (or violins) do not make a living doing this. Indeed, they pay others to take them to camps to play music or trips to take photos. It is a hobby. They do it for fun. The professional photographers end up doing very technical and skilled work for a diminishing set of paying customers: you will not make money taking another photo of Milford Sound.

But they earn a living doing a skill for which there is an economic value. That is called work, and is frequently anything but fun.

Therefore, do not train at great expense in your hobby. Unless you are one of the very few who will succeed in a world swamped by amateurs.