Sol, why don't you just start a new site and take on MMM.
I have given serious thought to starting a blog, but I wouldn't expect it to ever compete with MMM. I've even gone so far as to secure a domain and put up an empty landing page. The next step is just to starting writing there instead of here.
But I have some serious emotional obstacles to overcome. I feel like a new blog needs a more organized launch event than just me randomly deciding to write a bunch of stuff. I feel like it needs some sort of coherent theme, and an introductory post, and then probably two or three follow up posts before I give anyone the URL. So far my desire to create something good has stopped me from creating anything at all.
My second obstacle is deciding just how much of my life to share. MMM has been absolutely eviscerated for sharing even the most basic details about his family. Strangers have shown up at his home. People mocked his divorce. He's had to hire lawyers to deal with some of the site's content (including some which was my fault, so this is a very real concern for me). My life has always been an open book, but now I have a spouse and children and their lives are not mine to share, as hilarious as I think that would be. So as much as I feel comfortable with the online persona that has developed with this account, putting all of that content into one easily-archived place represents a significant risk. I probably need to come up with some firm ground rules for myself before I just start sharing whatever falls out of my fingertips.
Obstacle number three is that most of my time on the forum in the past six months has been related to politics, not finances, and that's a much harder topic for me to write about. I'm a particular kind of scientist, trained to turn complex and messy real world problems with poorly defined parameters into exact quantitative answers with too many decimal places. My one useful talent in life is in building mathematical models, and I'd like to write about that process as it relates to a variety of topics. Including but not limited to personal finance. The modern political era, so focused on narratives built on outright lies, flies in the face of everything I believe in. "Alternative facts" are like the Spanish Inquisition to me, and I'm angry about it. But if you're going to start a blog with any hope of reaching people, it's probably bad business sense to start off on day one by telling 30% of your potential audience that they are apparently too stupid to read anything that follows. Even on this forum, there are people with whom I have had both insightful conversations about the stock market and raging shouting matches about climate change, and to me these problems are best addressed using similar tools. Yet ideology trumps logic too often, and I haven't yet figured out how to reach those people. So, the blog sits empty, afraid to even try.
I agree that starting a blog is probably a more financially profitable use of my time than working, at this point. It would never clear the hundreds of thousands that MMM does, but lots of blogs make a few thousand dollars per year with minimal monetization and it would be virtually no additional work beyond the hundreds of hours I already spend here. But I don't really need the money, so I wouldn't be doing it for the dollars. For me, the attraction of what MMM has built isn't the income the site brings but the influence. He's an online "thought leader", a kind of public intellectual, and he has the power to use his words to shape and influence whole swaths of the population to make a better world. That's far more attractive to me than money I would just end up donating to charity anyway.
At this point in my life I would rather write blog posts twice a week for an audience of one million and get paid zero, than for an audience of 50 and get paid $1000 per post. And yes, I realize that a new blogger has an audience of zero and gets paid zero, but you get my point. The attraction of growing a blog isn't in the money.
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And now I've written an entire blog post on the MMM forum instead of my own blog. Again.