I recently bought a Japanese book from 2005 on how to make a blog.
It describes how you can even make money from blogs by having affiliate links, and how some people can make a living doing this. Then it compares making a blog to the modern-day equivalent of buying a lottery ticket - people do it for fun and put a small amount of money into it themselves, and some people just get really lucky and rich as a result.
I never really thought of it that way before.