Stop Trying To Make Money Online: 14 Reasons Why You Should Stop Trying To Make Money Online

Every person who tries to build income online eventually runs into a wall of voices telling them to stop. Maybe it is a family member. Maybe it is a former coworker who tried and quit. Maybe it is the voice inside their own head repeating doubts like a broken record. This video tackles 14 of the most common reasons people use to talk themselves and others out of making money online, and flips each one on its head with an honest, street-level rebuttal you can actually use.

Alston recorded this to address the frustration and resentment he keeps seeing in comment sections and conversations. The opening is intentionally jarring, a rapid-fire list of every excuse he has ever heard, because the goal is to make you recognize your own doubt before you can dismiss it. By the end, the message is clear: most of what people call reasons are actually projections from people who quit too early.

What You’ll Walk Out With

A plain-language rebuttal for each of the 14 most common “you should quit” arguments
Why a high barrier to entry is actually good news for you
How to reframe failure so it moves you forward instead of stopping you cold
Why you do not need an original idea, a genius-level skill set, or a big budget to get started
The difference between short-term, single-payout work like surveys and long-term, compounding content
How to recognize projection from people in your life so it stops landing as real advice
A concrete first step you can take this week with just your phone and a Wi-Fi connection
Not sure which online income path actually fits your situation? Find out at finder.platformproof.com.

Reason 1: It’s Too Hard

Alston’s first rebuttal is counterintuitive: you want it to be hard. Difficulty is a filter. Think about online surveys. You log in, click a few buttons, watch a short video, and you earn a fraction of a cent. The payout is tiny precisely because almost anyone can do it with zero learning curve. There is no barrier to entry, so there is no meaningful reward.

When you are building a real online business, you want there to be a level of difficulty that turns away the people who are not serious. The people who quit in week two are not your competition anymore. Every time the path gets harder, the field gets smaller, and the reward waiting at the end gets larger. Hard is a feature, not a flaw. The difficulty is what makes the reward worth having once you get there.

Reason 2: It’ll Never Work

This one almost always comes from someone who tried something and failed, or who watched someone else fail and drew a universal conclusion from a single data point. Alston calls it projection. They are not telling you about your future. They are telling you about their past, specifically about a moment they gave up or a path that did not fit them.

The practical response is to store the comment, not delete it. Remember who said it. Alston suggests that when you do start making money online, you go back to those people, not to rub anything in their face, but to see if you can offer them help or even a position. That mental file of doubters can become quiet fuel when you need it most.

Reason 3: You Don’t Have an Original Idea

Go search “how to make money online” right now. You will get roughly 3 million results. Not 3 million original ideas. Three million interpretations of the same core concepts. This video itself, as Alston points out, is not an original idea. The next video you watch will not be either. The internet was not built on originality. It was built on iteration, refinement, and better execution of existing ideas.

What you need is an original voice, not an original concept. You do not need to be the next version of anyone else. You need to be the first version of yourself. Your particular combination of life experience, perspective, and communication style is what separates your content or service from the thousands of others in the same space. The idea is the vehicle. You are the driver, and no one drives exactly the way you do.

Reason 4: You Don’t Have Any Skills

Skills can be learned. That is almost the whole rebuttal. Alston uses WordPress as a concrete example. If you want to build websites but know nothing about WordPress, you can watch a handful of free YouTube tutorials and go from complete beginner to someone who can build and launch a site for a small business. You do not need the skill before you start. You need the desire to learn it.

The three things that actually matter according to this video: a willingness to work hard, enough energy to keep going when results are slow, and consistent effort applied over time. Those are not specialized skills. Those are decisions. And you can make those decisions today regardless of where your knowledge currently stands.

Reason 5: “I Couldn’t Do It, So Neither Can You”

This is projection in its most direct form. Someone tells you their failure story and then hands you the conclusion as if it is a law of nature. It is not. Their failure says something about the specific path they took, the timing, the way they approached it, and maybe the amount of time they gave it before walking away. It says nothing reliable about your future.

The response is the same as Reason 2: file it. Keep the name and the comment. Use it as quiet motivation when your own doubt creeps in. When your income starts moving in the right direction, reach back. Offer help. That is a far more productive response than arguing with someone whose mind is already set on a conclusion they reached about themselves.

Reason 6: There’s Too Much Competition

Competition shows up where there is money. Nobody piles into a market that has no value. The fact that a space has heavy competition is the clearest signal available that people are making real money there. Dried-up markets have no competition because there is nothing worth competing for. When you see a crowded market, read it correctly: that crowd is proof of income.

The answer to high competition is not avoidance. It is raising your own standard. Alston is direct about this: you have to raise your game and raise your expectations for what you deliver. When the market is crowded, the people who win are the ones who show up with better content, better service, or a sharper point of view. Competition does not close the door. It just raises the bar you need to clear, and clearing a bar is something you can practice.

Reason 7: Everything Online Is a Scam

This statement is almost always made by someone who was burned once, or who watched someone else get burned, and then applied the worst-case experience to the entire category. Alston acknowledges that scams exist and that if you have been scammed, that experience is real and worth taking seriously. But scams almost always come with visible red flags you can learn to spot.

The clearest baseline he gives: you never have to pay money to receive money. If an opportunity requires an upfront payment to unlock your earnings, that is a signal worth investigating before you commit. He also uses Amazon as an example of how the word “scam” gets thrown around loosely. If a product arrives missing pieces and the return process is frustrating, a buyer might call the whole platform a scam. That is not what a scam is. A scam is when something is built specifically to take from you without delivering anything real in return. Learn to tell the difference, and you will protect yourself without having to avoid the entire internet.

Reason 8: You Have to Be a Genius

Alston describes himself as a regular person. Not a genius. Not someone with a special advantage handed to him. A regular person who shows up, learns what he needs to learn, and keeps going past the point where most people stop. The people you see succeeding in content creation, affiliate marketing, and digital products are almost all regular people who committed to a process and stayed with it.

What actually matters: the ability to learn new things, the drive to keep pushing when the results are not there yet, and genuine interest in the problem you are trying to solve. Those three things are far more important than raw intelligence. Millions of people are making income online right now. The vast majority of them are not geniuses. They are consistent, and consistency is something you choose.

Reason 9: It’s Too Expensive to Get Started

You can start this week with what you already have. Your phone shoots high-quality video. A $30 microphone is optional, not required. You can blog from a phone. You can upload YouTube videos from a phone. You can build a basic affiliate presence without spending a dollar on tools or ads. Alston has a dedicated video about blogging from a phone because this question comes up so often.

The barrier is not financial. Most people who use cost as a reason have not looked at what they can actually do with the device already in their pocket. A connection to the internet and the ability to record is enough to get started. The real cost of building something online is time and attention, and those are resources you already control, starting today.

Reason 10: It Takes Too Long

The expectation of instant results is one of the biggest obstacles Alston sees. You create something, step back to look at it, and feel disappointed when the traffic or the income does not arrive immediately. That disappointment is a mismatch between how online income actually works and the mental model most people bring to it based on how their day job pays them.

Online surveys are the counter-example he keeps returning to. You take a survey. You get paid a tiny amount almost immediately. That is the trade: speed for scale. The moment you ask for more money, you accept more time. A YouTube video, in Alston’s words, did not come together in ten minutes. Time was spent developing the idea and thinking through the process. But that video pays him for years after he publishes it. One piece of content. Multiple payouts. Across multiple years.

The reframe is this: stop thinking of content as an expense and start thinking of it as an investment. You are not spending an afternoon creating something. You are planting something that pays you back on a timeline you cannot fully predict but can reasonably expect. Five pieces of content can pay you for five years. The math only works if you stay long enough for it to work.

Reason 11: You Have to Be Famous First

Every person who is famous online started at zero. Zero followers. Zero subscribers. Zero name recognition. The YouTubers, bloggers, and podcasters you look up to were completely invisible before they started showing up consistently. The work they did before you found them is the reason you can find them now. Fame is the output of showing up repeatedly, not a prerequisite for starting.

Think about actors and actresses as a parallel, Alston suggests. The time you see them on screen represents a fraction of the time they spent behind the scenes before that camera ever turned on them. Auditions, workshops, rejection, more auditions. Fame is built from effort that happened before anyone was watching. The same principle applies online. You build the audience by creating content before anyone is there to see it.

Reason 12: People in Other Countries Will Do It Cheaper

This objection surfaces most often in service-based work like writing, design, development, and customer support. The concern is real. There are people around the world who will do the same work for a lower hourly rate, and some clients on platforms like Fiverr or Upwork are specifically looking for the lowest price they can find.

But the clients who drive real income are not shopping for cheap. They are shopping for reliable. Someone who has been burned by slow delivery, unclear communication, or work that needs to be redone from scratch is actively looking for a provider they can trust. Competing on quality, communication, and reliability is a positioning choice you make, not a geographic lottery you are born into. You can be that reliable provider from wherever you are right now.

Not sure which online income path actually fits your background and schedule?

Answer a few short questions and get a personalized recommendation at finder.platformproof.com.

Reason 13: You Will Fail

Failure is the most misunderstood word in the entire making-money-online conversation. Alston draws a clear line: failure is bad only if you become stagnant, if you quit, if you sit with the loss and do nothing useful with it. Failure that produces learning is not a setback. It is a redirect.

He gives a concrete example. Say you built a blog and it never generated the income you hoped for. That failure, if you pay attention to it, might show you that you enjoy video more than writing. It might reveal that your audience responds better to a specific format or topic you had not fully explored. The blog that did not work becomes the data that points you toward what does. Each failure contains an opportunity to learn something that steers you closer to the result you are after. Failure is success waiting just around the corner, in his words.

Reason 14: You Will Quit / It’s Just Not Gonna Work

This one is less a specific objection and more a general verdict people hand down when they have run out of specific objections. They do not offer evidence. They do not explain which part of your plan is flawed. They just land on “it’s not going to work” and say it with enough certainty that you start to absorb it as fact.

Alston’s response: these people do not understand how building a business works. They do not understand how online income compounds over time. You can try to explain it, but you are often talking to someone whose conclusion is already set. The more productive use of your energy is to keep building while they talk. You will only quit if you choose to quit. And the only time that makes sense is when you have reached the goal you set, not when someone else runs out of patience with your timeline.

A Decision Framework: What to Do When Someone Says Stop

When someone in your life hands you one of these 14 reasons, run it through a short checklist before you let it affect your direction.

Source check: Has this person successfully built online income? If not, their objection is based on fear or a single bad experience, not verified data.
Specificity check: Are they naming a specific flaw in your plan? Or are they making a general statement about the whole category? General statements deserve far less weight than specific, detailed critiques.
Projection check: Is the objection about your situation, or about something that happened to them? People who failed often speak in universals (“it never works”) when they mean particulars (“it did not work for me, on that path, at that time”).
Action check: What would you actually do differently in response to this objection? If the answer is “stop entirely,” that is almost never the right answer. Adjust the approach, test a different angle, or experiment with a new format, but stopping entirely should be your last resort, not your first.

Find Your X

The 14 reasons in this video are not the real obstacle. The real obstacle is not knowing which specific path fits your current skills, schedule, and situation. When you know your path, objections stop landing as hard because you have something concrete to point to. Find your path at finder.platformproof.com.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it actually possible to make real money online in 2025?

Yes. Millions of people generate part-time and full-time income online through content creation, affiliate marketing, freelance services, and digital products. The barrier to entry is lower than it has ever been because the tools are free or near-free. The question is not whether it is possible. The question is which method fits your specific situation.

How long does it realistically take to start earning?

It depends heavily on the method. Freelance service work can generate income within weeks if you land a client quickly. Content creation like YouTube or blogging typically takes months before the income becomes meaningful. Affiliate marketing sits somewhere in between, depending on whether you are building an audience or using paid traffic. The more passive the income you are after, the longer the ramp-up period you should plan for.

Do I need money to start making money online?

Not necessarily. As Alston covers in this video, a phone and an internet connection are enough to get started with YouTube, blogging, or social media content. Affiliate marketing has free entry points through organic content. Freelancing requires no upfront investment beyond your time. The methods that cost money, like paid advertising or building a software product, can come later once you have learned the basics and have early revenue to reinvest.

What if I don’t have a skill worth selling online?

Every learnable skill starts at zero. If you are willing to put in time to learn WordPress, video editing, copywriting, or any other in-demand skill, you can develop something worth selling. Free resources for building practical skills are available at every level. The absence of a current skill is a starting point, not a permanent stopping point. Your job right now is to pick one skill and begin.

How do I spot a scam before I get pulled in?

The clearest rule from this video: you should never have to pay money to receive money. If a program requires a buy-in before you can earn anything, that warrants serious scrutiny before you commit. Other red flags include vague income claims with no verifiable track record, extreme pressure to act immediately, and structures that require recruiting other people before you can earn any meaningful income yourself.

What if I start and fail?

Use Alston’s frame: failure is only a problem if you stop and do nothing with it. Every failure carries information about what did not work, and that information is worth more than the time you invested. Adjust based on what you learned, pick a new direction or refine the old one, and keep going. The people who build consistent income online are not the ones who never failed. They are the ones who failed and kept adjusting until something clicked.

How do I handle the people in my life who keep telling me to quit?

Recognize the comment for what it usually is: a projection from someone who either tried and quit, or who never tried and is now afraid on your behalf. You do not need to argue with them or convince them. Store the comment as quiet fuel. Keep building. When the results start coming in, the conversation changes on its own without you having to win any arguments along the way.

Is making money online still worth starting in a crowded market?

Yes, for exactly the reason Alston outlines: crowded markets are crowded because there is money in them. Nobody competes heavily for something that is not worth competing for. A market with no competition usually means there is no meaningful income to chase either. The answer to a crowded market is showing up with something sharper than what is already there, whether that is better quality, a more specific audience, or a clearer point of view than everyone else is currently offering.

Sources

Alston Godbolt, “Stop Trying To Make Money Online: 14 Reasons Why You Should Stop Trying To Make Money Online,” YouTube, https://youtu.be/SJ4L0Slmpwk
alstongodbolt.com, Stop Looking For The Easiest Way To Make Money Online, https://alstongodbolt.com/stop-looking-for-easiest-way-make-money-online/