Are people still monetizing blogs?

The only way to successfully monetize a blog IMO is to have a ton of traffic. Adsense works good if you have enough traffic.

You need to learn about blogging before you get started your website, Choose your right niche and read about SEO and then get started your journey. Build your blog with good ranking and traffic then you can go for the monetizing methods such as Adsense, Affiliate.. etc.

Yes Bloggers still earning lots of dollar form blogging. If you start a brand new blog on a highly competitive niche then its difficult
for you to rank this blog try to find hiden niche then start a blog on less competitive niche.
if you want to earn from blogging then first you need to know about
how to setup a blog?
how to start a blog and maintain it? You need to learn SEO to start Blogging.

You thought wrong.

It's impossible to saturate a niche. Not going to happen.

Nobody goes to one website and says "I'm done, I found one web site now it's time to throw my computer in the trash".

Starting a blog is easy, people still make lots of money,bloggers like Niel Patel, Puala Pant, Spencer at niche pursuits! These people make big money. If you need to know how to start a blog click here

This guide is very useful and includes a ton of pictures and highly simplified guidelines - wow! It would be even better if there was a video or a webinar you could watch that included all of this information in the same format, then you wouldn't have to describe what's happening in all of the pictures through text. I would say though that the advantage of this method is that I don't have to keep rewinding the video, I actually find this very useful.

I think the person I was speaking to actually knows how to go through this process so I don't even necessarily need help with starting the blog. It was funny that Neil Patel was mentioned though because I visited his blog recently and really liked it (I have been doing a lot of online research on blogging and SEO in particular as well as other facets of internet marketing).

I was going to post yukon an angry reply for rebuking me but then I realized that a guy with 20K posts probably knows something about when a niche is saturated and when it isn't, and whether it's possible to saturate it or not. If a niche can't be saturated, how can you break in? I read a lot of articles talking about evaluating competition and saying that some niches are now nearly impossible to break into because the players are so big...

Of course people are still making money by monetizing blogs. Yukon is right when he says there is no such thing as "over saturation". The goal is to get on page one for the search terms you want to appear for. Who cares about the other 1,697,463 sites also vying for page one? The amount of competition is never important. The quality of the competition on page one is.

Just because blogs were not able to lead to sales for a water bottle doesn't mean they don't work for other things (how much online demand is there for water bottles?). Those same blogs that were linking to your product may have worked perfectly well for other products that are substantially different from things you can buy in a local store. A perfect example of something that a blog could write about and promote that would do MUCH better online than a water bottle is a Glare Stomper. Both may appeal to the same type of reader but one of them can only be bought online.

there are a lot of ways to monetize a blog. you just have to do some researches, trial-error testing, and be flexible. there is no one solution that fits all.

for example, the easiest way to make money out of a blog is by using advertising. as a start, adsense is one of the widely popular ones. the next is getting paid for writing/reviewing a product. others include affiliate, selling ad space directly to advertisers and so forth.

rarely a popular blog only uses one method of monetization.

but the thing about monetization for blogs is that you need a lot of traffic to begin with.

so here patience is the key. start your way up by getting more visitors. start creating followers, newsletter, email marketing, etc. use social media to your advantage, submit your feed and links.

in short, make yourself seen.

yes it's true that the blogosphere is somehow too populated. as to my opinion, don't directly compete with older and more influenced blogs. young blogs won't stand a chance. but use your strategy to get more search engines' traffic. funnel them through keywords research. learn from competitors, and seek their weaknesses.

You will be surprise how many new blogging websites are created daily. Many people are still making a living out of blogging.
Picking up the right niche brings better returns compared to marketing a water bottle.