I Tried It: Ranking the BEST & WORST Side Hustles for 2025

I have tried a lot of side hustles. Not in theory. Not by reading about them. Actually tried them. Survey sites. Watching ads. Pay-to-play games. Delivery driving. Blogging. Long-form video. And I can tell you with real experience which ones ate my time alive and which ones actually built something. In this post, I’m ranking the best and worst side hustles for 2025 from F tier to A tier so you stop guessing and start moving.

The goal here is not to give you a nice-sounding list. The goal is to protect your time, because time is the one asset you cannot buy back. When you’re sitting there watching ads or grinding through solitaire apps hoping to cash out, you are trading your most valuable resource for coins. Literally. And there is a better use of that hour. Let’s get into the ranking.

What You’ll Walk Out With

The exact side hustles I put in F tier and why you should never touch them
Why pay-to-play apps like Solitaire Clash are a structured scam
The hidden costs that make delivery driving far less profitable than it looks
Why blogging still works in 2025 but only if you adapt to the AI reality
Why long-form video beats short-form for building trust and lasting income
The best way to monetize any content platform so you actually own the relationship
A bonus niche idea that prints traffic every single school year
How to find the exact side hustle that fits your current skills at finder.platformproof.com

F Tier: Survey Sites, Ad Watching, and Microtasks

Let’s start at the bottom. Survey sites, websites that pay you to watch ads, and microtask platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk and Pico Workers. These land in F tier, full stop. Stay away. Do not enter.

Here is the core problem: you are getting paid pennies for your active attention. I mean literal pennies. The math never works in your favor because the business model is designed against you. These platforms have a contract with a third party. That third party pays the platform, the platform takes their cut, and you get a sliver of what remains. You are not the customer. You are the product being rented to someone else.

The deeper issue is that every dollar you earn from survey sites requires you to be actively doing it. Stop doing it, stop earning. That is the definition of a dead-end income. I saw a woman at my daughter’s gymnastics class watching ads on her phone while crocheting at the same time, trying to double-stack her passive moments. And I sat there thinking about what she could have done with that same hour. She could have written an email to a list. She could have updated a blog post. She could have put together an outline for a YouTube video or a short-form TikTok. The time cost is identical. The upside is not.

With microtask platforms specifically, a lot of what Amazon Mechanical Turk originally paid people to do was help train AI. Label images. Transcribe audio clips. Identify objects. Make selections the algorithm couldn’t make on its own. The problem now is that AI has gotten dramatically better at those tasks. The demand for human microtask labor on those platforms has dropped, and the pay was already insulting before AI improved. Pico Workers, which targets workers mainly in the Philippines, runs on the same model. You might get hired to watch a YouTube video, like it, comment on it, and subscribe. You are literally being paid to be fake engagement. Not only does it not build anything, it is also ethically shaky. That combination of low pay and zero long-term value puts the whole category at F tier.

F Tier (Bonus): Pay-to-Play Games Like Solitaire Clash

These deserve their own section because the marketing on them is genuinely deceptive. You have probably seen the ads. “Play solitaire and get paid.” I have a full video dedicated to what I actually made from Solitaire Clash in one hour. Short answer: nothing worth your time.

Here is how the math breaks down. Let’s say you enter a tournament where the prize pool is $100. You are not going to win $100. You might win 40% of it if you take first place. Second place might get 20%. Third gets 10%. The platform that built the game takes a cut every time you deposit money and again when the tournament runs. They are making money twice on every contest you enter. You are risking real money for the chance at a fraction of a prize, and the house never loses.

The pay-to-play model is built on the same psychology as a casino. You put money in. The odds are structured against you. The platform profits whether you win or lose. And unlike a casino where you go for fun and know the deal, these apps market themselves as legitimate income opportunities. They are not. They are a structured way to extract money from people who are looking for a shortcut. Hard pass. F tier alongside survey sites.

C/D Tier: Delivery Driving (DoorDash, GrubHub, Uber Eats, Instacart)

Delivery driving lands in the C to D tier range, and the reason most people miss it is that the real cost is hidden. On the surface it looks like easy money. Open an app, pick up food, drop it off, get paid. But let’s walk through the actual overhead.

First, gas. That one most people account for. But then there is oil changes. Brake pads. Windshield wiper fluid. Tires wearing down faster because you are driving more miles than you otherwise would. The wear and tear on your vehicle is real, and if you are doing this as a primary side hustle, you are shortening the life of your car. That depreciation does not show up on your DoorDash dashboard, but it is coming out of your pocket when something breaks.

Then there is insurance. If you are being honest with your insurance company and telling them you are driving for a gig delivery service, your rate goes up. A lot of drivers do not disclose this, which creates a different kind of risk entirely. And if you get into an accident while on a delivery and your insurer finds out you were doing gig work undisclosed, you can find yourself without coverage at the worst possible moment.

Now layer in the time math. A lot of deliveries pay a base rate plus tip. Tips for food delivery are often $2 to $3. You drive to the restaurant, wait for the order, drive to the customer, and hand it off. Depending on traffic and distance, that could be 20 to 40 minutes for $5 to $8 before you subtract gas costs. The real hourly rate, after expenses, is often much lower than the headline number. And there is no passive component here at all. You stop driving, you stop earning. Immediately.

I also want to flag something that does not get talked about: sitting in a car for hours every day is not great for your health. You are sedentary, you are breathing exhaust fumes at intersections, and you are absorbing stress from traffic and customer complaints. That health cost is not zero. Amazon Flex may have slightly different economics, but the same underlying calculus applies to all gig delivery. It is not the worst use of time if you need cash right now and have no other option, which is why it gets C/D and not F. But if you have any capacity to invest time in something that compounds, do not make delivery your primary hustle.

B Tier: Blogging in 2025

People ask me constantly whether blogging is still profitable. The answer is yes, but the game has changed and you need to understand how before you commit to it.

I still get traffic to my blogs today. It is not what it used to be, but it still generates income. The challenge is twofold. First, AI is now pulling pieces of blog content and displaying answers directly on the front page of Google. That means a searcher can get your information without ever clicking through to your site. Your traffic numbers take a hit even when you rank. Second, AI scraping means your content can end up training someone else’s model, used in their outputs, with no attribution or compensation to you.

So the solution is not to abandon blogging. The solution is to make your blog harder to scrape and replace. That means writing with a voice that is clearly human and personal. It means including information that AI cannot source from existing content: your own data, your own experiments, first-hand experiences that have not been published anywhere else. When your blog has a genuine point of view and original insight, it is much harder for a model to replicate it and much harder for Google to serve it without sending people to you. Blogging earns a B tier because the distribution challenge is real, but it is not dead. It rewards people who actually have something original to say.

A Tier: Long-Form Video Content

Long-form video is the A tier pick, and the reason comes down to trust. Trust is the currency of online business. Every platform, every product, every email list works better when your audience trusts you. And the most efficient way to build trust at scale is to let someone sit with you for 20, 30, or 60 minutes and watch how you think.

If you have watched this video for 16 minutes, it is because something about how I communicate lands for you. I have told you about driving the wrong way down a one-way street at Carthage College. I have shared when I first went to college and could not figure out why my dial-up phone jack would not fit into an Ethernet port. I have used my own experiences, my own personality, and my own honest assessments to give you a real picture of who I am. That is something AI-generated faceless content cannot replicate. And it is something short-form video builds only slowly.

Think about meeting someone for the first time. You have a guard up. You do not know them. You have a brief exchange and you come away with almost nothing. The more time you spend with them, the more you understand their thinking, their values, their credibility. Video works exactly the same way. A 60-minute YouTube video can do more trust-building work than 50 TikToks. Because the viewer chose to spend that time with you, and every minute they stayed is a micro-confirmation that they are interested in more.

TikTok now allows 60-minute videos. YouTube has always supported long-form. The infrastructure for long-form content is everywhere. And the compound effect is real: you make the video once, and it works for weeks, months, and potentially years without you doing anything additional. Every hour of content I have published is still out there building relationships while I sleep. That is the definition of a leveraged asset. A tier, no contest.

B Tier: Short-Form Video

Short-form video lands at B tier. You can absolutely make money with YouTube Shorts, TikToks, and Instagram Reels. People do it every day. But there is a structural challenge that makes it harder than long-form: you have to get someone hooked in seconds, keep them through a 60 to 90 second video, and then hope the algorithm or sheer compellingness of your content gets them to consume more. The trust-building that happens naturally in a long-form video requires a much higher volume of short-form content to replicate.

I put out 5 to 10 TikTok videos to convey what one 20-minute YouTube video can communicate in a single session. That is not a reason to skip short-form entirely, especially if you are building an audience across multiple platforms. But if you have limited time and you are choosing where to invest your content creation hours, long-form gives you more trust per hour spent. Short-form is a volume game. Long-form is a depth game. Both can win. Long-form is easier to win with less output.

Not sure which of these side hustles is actually right for your situation?

The Platform Proof Finder asks you a few questions about your skills, schedule, and goals and points you to the specific path that fits. Try it free at finder.platformproof.com.

The Best Way to Monetize Whatever Platform You Choose

Once you have chosen your content platform, the monetization question becomes critical. Here is my honest ranking of monetization models from best to less-good:

Digital products are the top pick. They give you the most control, and more importantly, they give you access to the customer. When someone buys your digital product, you know who they are. You have their email. You can follow up, offer them more, build a real relationship, and help them continuously. That customer relationship is worth more than any single transaction.

Communities and recurring monthly memberships are the second tier. The reason is predictability. One of the hard realities of digital products is that you start every month at zero. You need new buyers every month to maintain income. A monthly membership builds a baseline. You know before the month even starts that X number of people are paying you. That predictability changes how you operate and makes the business feel stable rather than frantic.

Software as a service (SaaS) is powerful for the same reason: recurring revenue. If you have a technical background or a specific problem you can solve with software, SaaS gives you the best revenue profile of any model. The challenge is the upfront investment to build and maintain the product.

Affiliate marketing is viable but ranks lower for a specific reason: you do not know who your buyers are. If someone clicks your affiliate link and buys, you get a commission. But you do not get access to their email. You do not get to build a relationship. You are sending customers to another company and getting paid a finder’s fee. It works, and it is genuinely passive once you have content ranking, but the customer belongs to the merchant, not to you. That is a structural limitation on your long-term growth.

Honest Drawbacks of Each Tier

This would not be a useful ranking if I only told you the upside. Here are the real drawbacks you need to factor in:

Long-form video (A tier) drawback: The feedback loop is slow. You will likely publish 10 to 20 videos before you start to see meaningful traffic or audience growth. That requires sustained effort with delayed gratification. Most people quit in this window. If you can hold on through it, the compounding works powerfully in your favor. But the ramp-up period is real.

Short-form video (B tier) drawback: Volume dependency. You need a consistent, high output to stay relevant on short-form platforms. One great video does not carry you for months the way a cornerstone YouTube video can. The algorithm needs constant feeding, which means constant production.

Blogging (B tier) drawback: The AI-driven change to search is not slowing down. The platforms that distribute blog content (Google, primarily) have a direct financial incentive to serve answers without sending clicks. That structural tension is not going to resolve in your favor over time. Blogging works best as part of a larger content strategy rather than as your only channel.

Digital products (monetization) drawback: You start each month at zero unless you layer in a recurring component. The sale itself is not the business. Building a funnel, an email list, and a follow-up system around the product is what makes it sustainable. That infrastructure takes time to build.

A Bonus Niche Idea Worth Your Attention

Before we close out the rankings, I want to leave you with a niche idea that most people sleep on: content for first-time college students.

I was the first person in my family to go to college. And as the first one, you genuinely do not know what to expect. I graduated high school in 2002 and at home we had dial-up internet. Modem, phone jack, the whole setup. When I got to Marian University and they had high-speed Ethernet, I spent I do not know how long trying to plug a phone jack into an Ethernet port wondering why it kept falling out. It took my Resident Advisor to explain what I was doing wrong. That is how unprepared I was.

Here is the thing: every single year there are new first-time college students who do not know what they need. Target, Amazon, and Walmart all build out dedicated college sections every summer. There are products specifically designed for dorm rooms that most people have never heard of: dorm-specific mattress pads for those oddly sized dorm beds that are smaller than a standard twin, mini fridges with specific wattage limits for dorm electrical codes, storage solutions designed for rooms with no closets. These products exist, they sell, and someone is getting affiliate commissions on every purchase.

The niche is evergreen. As long as there are colleges, there are incoming freshmen who need this content. The search volume resets every year. If you can go to target.com, browse their college section, and build a blog or YouTube channel helping new students understand what they actually need and why, you have a compounding, renewable traffic source that gets new energy every August. Pair that with affiliate links to the products you recommend, and the monetization practically writes itself.

The Full Side Hustle Tier List

Here is the complete ranking distilled into one place so you can screenshot it and reference it later:

A tier: Long-form video content (YouTube, TikTok 60-minute format) – builds trust at scale, compounds over time, works while you sleep
B tier: Short-form video (YouTube Shorts, TikTok, Instagram Reels) – works but requires volume and strategic hooks to build trust
B tier: Blogging – still viable and still generates traffic and income, but needs AI-resistant original content and a voice that stands out
C tier: Static text and image content without video – lower engagement and harder to build audience trust
C/D tier: Delivery driving (DoorDash, GrubHub, Uber Eats, Instacart, Amazon Flex) – real income but eroded by vehicle overhead, time cost, and zero passive component
F tier: Survey sites, watching ads for pay, microtask platforms (Amazon Mechanical Turk, Pico Workers) – pays pennies, requires constant active attention, helps other people get rich while you stay poor
F tier: Pay-to-play games (Solitaire Clash, Cash Solitaire, etc.) – structured to extract your money, prizes are fractional, and the house always wins

Find Your X

Knowing the tier list is one thing. Knowing which option fits your specific situation is another. Your schedule, your existing skills, your comfort on camera, your topic knowledge, and your income timeline all factor into which path makes the most sense to start with. The Platform Proof Finder walks you through exactly that. Answer a few questions and get a clear recommendation for where to put your first hours. No guessing, no generic advice. Visit finder.platformproof.com and find yours.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you really make a full-time income from YouTube in 2025?

Yes, but the timeline is longer than most people expect. YouTube ad revenue alone is not typically enough at first. The path to full-time income usually runs through a combination of ad revenue, affiliate marketing, digital products, and sometimes sponsorships. Creators who treat it like a business from day one, building an email list and a product alongside the channel, get there faster than those who wait for AdSense to scale.

Is affiliate marketing dead because of AI?

Not dead, but harder. The problem is that Google now surfaces AI-generated answers on many product comparison queries that used to send traffic to affiliate review sites. The affiliate bloggers who are surviving are the ones with first-hand experience and genuine opinions, not just keyword-stuffed comparison tables. If you have personally used the things you are recommending and can write about them with real detail, affiliate marketing still works.

How much do delivery drivers actually make after expenses?

It depends heavily on market, time of day, and how honestly you account for vehicle costs. Studies have put the average net hourly rate for gig delivery drivers at somewhere between $10 and $15 per hour after expenses in many U.S. markets once you factor in gas, maintenance, and self-employment taxes. In high-density urban areas with good tip culture, you can do better. In suburban markets with long drives between stops, you can do worse. The key is that most drivers do not track their actual vehicle depreciation cost, which means they are almost always overestimating their real take-home.

What is the first digital product someone should create?

The easiest first digital product is something that solves a specific problem you have already solved for yourself. A checklist, a template, a short guide, a resource list. It does not have to be a course or a complex program. The best starting digital products are simple enough that you can build them in a week and specific enough that the right buyer immediately understands the value. Start narrow, prove the concept, then expand.

Are survey sites ever worth it?

For the overwhelming majority of people, no. The pay per hour is too low and the income ceiling is too low. There is no version of survey sites where you build something that grows over time. The one narrow exception might be if you are waiting somewhere with nothing else to do and no internet-based content creation is possible. But if you have a smartphone and a quiet moment, there is always a better use of that time than surveys.

How do I make my blog AI-resistant?

Write content that cannot be sourced from content that already exists online. That means first-person experience with specific details. Your own data. Opinions that are actually yours, not a synthesis of what everyone else has said. Include information that comes from your life: a specific test you ran, a mistake you made, a result you got. AI models can scrape and remix published content, but they cannot generate your specific lived experience. That is your competitive moat in a world where generic content is infinitely reproducible.

Is faceless YouTube a good side hustle?

It is harder than people expect. Faceless channels do work, but they face a structural disadvantage: viewers have less reason to stay because there is no person to connect with. The content has to be exceptionally well-produced and genuinely useful to hold attention the way a face-on-camera creator can. Faceless also makes it harder to build the kind of trust that converts viewers into buyers. It is not impossible, but it requires more production quality, more strategic content planning, and more patience than most beginners factor in.

What is the single biggest mistake people make when picking a side hustle?

Choosing based on income ceiling rather than fit. People see that someone made $30,000 a month with dropshipping and chase dropshipping, even though they hate logistics and have no interest in the products. The side hustles that actually work long enough to pay off are the ones where you can stay consistent through the slow early period. That consistency is almost always driven by genuine interest in the topic or the craft. Pick something you can do for 12 months before seeing meaningful results and you have filtered out most of the wrong options immediately.

Sources

Alston Godbolt, Platform Proof YouTube channel – personal experience with survey sites, microtask platforms, and gig delivery reviewed in the video
Solitaire Clash / Cash games – first-hand test documented in a dedicated Platform Proof video on the channel
Amazon Mechanical Turk – platform documentation and publicly available worker discussion forums
Target.com college shop – seasonal product section for back-to-school and dorm essentials
Gig worker earnings research – widely reported by The Rideshare Guy and similar independent gig economy research outlets