If you're poor and need to improve your financial situation, sure. But now that I have a solid middle-class job I don't personally feel a need to earn even more

If you're poor and need to improve your financial situation, sure. But now that I have a solid middle-class job I don't personally feel a need to earn even more money. Now I spend my incremental time on things that generally don't earn money: research side projects, writing Wikipedia articles, contributing to open-source projects, etc. In many cases I've found trying to monetize content makes it worse. Not always, but sometimes the right choice from an intellectual perspective is to improve an existing article somewhere else, whether by editing Wikipedia, or sending in corrections to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, or sending a documentation-related pull request to a project on GitHub. The alternative, if I put monetization first, would be to always find a way I could "own" the content: it needs to be published on my domain, where I get the credit and SEO and personal-branding out of it, and can put AdSense or Amazon Affiliate links on it. Instead of fixing the Wikipedia article or the docs, write a linkbaity blog post mocking their errors, for example, and submit it to HN. Not as constructive, but many people do exactly that. Decisions that are good for monetization don't always magically align with non-monetary goals like improving publicly accessible information, and sometimes they're in direct conflict. In that case, I don't think it's necessarily laudable to prioritize monetization.