Viral Content Websites

Go for it. People will always have an interest in gossip and lists and click-baity things.

Think of these websites as pizza places and such restaurants: One can open up shop in a competitive area and still make money despite competing with other spots.

Same goes for everything else. Look at Matthew Woodward's blog, for example. When he launched it, there were already a million others out there, but he's still quite successful.

It's all about adding your own spin to things as much as possible.

And also remember: You don't necessarily need to dominate in that area; you only need a 0.1% of the pie to make a decent living.

I just read a recent blog post about this. The guy went through the whole business model and showed examples of people who did it. The comments on the blog post had many people trying it out, some quite successfully. I can't remember the blog.

It is still viable you just need to really work the viral part.

Master those "click bait" article titles like "At first I hated this guy. But after what he says at 2:41 I fell in love" or "You won't believe what this little girl did to make her father break down in tears. Even I was SHOCKED"

Then promote/share the heck out of them.

Even ones that don't go "viral" will still get shared around to the tune of 1000's of article views per day.

If you look at many of these 'clickbait' articles floating around you will see:

1) It is rarely their own content. They take a YouTube video, picture or meme and legally share it (curate) with a new 'clickbait' title

2) The content is often old. I see 'clickbait' leading to recent articles featuring 4 year old YouTube videos. It doesn't have to be current events or recently published content. It has more to do with how you present the curated content and how good your titles are for getting clicks and shares.

3) Many people are not focusing on a 'niche'. People are making generic sites and putting anything they think will get traffic up. I think there is an opportunity to niche down a bit and still have variety and crazy viral stories.

Edit: See Steve's answer above